Skepticism

EVENTS

Bob Enyart and Will Duffy, partners in idiocy

We’ve got another chittering weasel of a creationist raving in the comments, a fellow going by the name YesYouNeedJesus. He’s also sending me email.

PZ, I first heard about you on Bob Enyart’s radio show about the fact that you turned down an offer to debate Bob. I must say that my first impression of you is that you are smarter than most evolutionists. Smarter because the evolutionists that debate Bob get absolutely destroyed every time. Every evolutionist that I spoke to who was at the debate between Bob Enyart and Reasons to Believe willfully admitted that their side (evolution) lost. Bob’s debate with Eugenie Scott was just flat-out epic and is still my all-time favorite science debate. Of course they all made the mistake of debating Bob and you did not. You are smart, I’ll give you that. I think they made the mistake of underestimating Bob because he’s just a radio talk show host. Personally I think that Walt Brown is the greatest scientist of our day, but after Walt Brown, Bob is one of the most brilliant scientific minds I’ve ever listened to. I believe that the evolutionist’s new tactic is to avoid debating creationists because the arguments are just becoming impossible to refute. While that’s quite the tactical strategy and may work for a short time, it is encouraging to see the creation movement grow like a wildfire. And I do believe it’s just a short amount of time before we see evolution become the next ‘spontaneous generation’ and become obsolete. Don’t forget that if you dared question spontaneous generation, you were labeled as anti-science. Good luck to you. -Will

You read that, and apart from the creationist crazy, you get the impression that this guy is just someone with no ties to Enyart (other than his deep and abiding passionate love for him) who listened to the radio show, found out about these evilutionists, and ran over here to see what was up.

This is not the case. His name is Will Duffy, something revealed in the first few minutes of the video below, and he’s Bob Enyart’s producer.

You know, this kind of thing really bugs me. Why do you have to lie and mislead and conceal on the little, trivial things? Why hide the fact that you have a vested interest in Enyart’s show, and are actually deeply involved in the program? I see that, and right away, I know I’m dealing with a shameless liar for Jesus.

And then, of course, there’s the raving insanity. Walt Brown and Bob Enyart are the greatest scientists of the day? Someone alert the NAS and the Nobel Foundation!

Here’s the video. It’s a year old, and it’s a surprise to me (which goes to show how impressed I am with this Enyart freak). I dismissed a request to debate this kook — I’d just come off a debate with his loony pal, Jerry Bergman — and so he issued a challenge that I hadn’t even noticed until now.

He’s asking me to explain the origin of the superior oblique muscle, one of the extra-ocular muscles, which has a tendon that travels through a pulley-like strap called a trochlea. This muscle abducts and depresses the eye; try to look at your nose, and that’s one of the muscles responsible for pulling the eyeball in that direction. Enyart thinks the muscle would have been useless without the trochlear pulley, which is silly: the muscle could have had a different attachment in the orbit, or in the absence of the trochlea could have swiveled the eye upwards, or most likely of all, the suite of extra-ocular muscles and that little loop of tendon all co-evolved. We are well-integrated wholes, you know, and we didn’t evolve one toe at a time — nature selected for functionality as a complete organism.

I don’t see any obvious obstacle to an arrangement of muscles evolving, but I don’t know the details of this particular set. And there’s actually a very good reason for that.

This is a case where you have to step back from the creationist and look at the big picture. Don’t get bogged down in the details. Take a look at the whole context of the question.

We don’t know exactly how this evolved because all living vertebrates, with the exception of the lamprey, have the same arrangement of extra-ocular muscles. This is a primitive and very highly conserved condition, with no extant intermediates. We’ve seen the arrangement of these muscles in 400 million year old placoderm fossils, and they’re the same; these muscles probably evolved 450 million or more years ago, and we have no record of any intermediate state. So I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.

But that’s where we have to look at the big picture: Bob Enyart, a raving loon and young earth creationist who thinks the whole planet is less than 10,000 years old, is asking me to recount the details of an event that occurred almost half a billion years ago. I should think it’s enough to shatter his position and show that he’s wrong to simply note that however it evolved, it happened in animals 75,000 times older than he claims the planet is. Has he even noticed this little problem with his question?

Will Duffy wants it carbon-dated. The fossil has already been dated; it’s over 70 million years old. Carbon dating is only good up to a maximum age of about 50,000 years. He wants to hold a yardstick up against a mile-long object and ask how long it is. This makes no sense at all.

Bob Enyart called Jack Horner and offered him $20,000 to measure the C14 in the T. rex specimen. You can tell Horner is both stunned and amused at the stupidity of the request.

The age of the specimen is not in question, and even if it were, carbon dating is so absurdly inappropriate and useless that only an ignorant clown would ask to do it: it doesn’t matter what number would come out of the measurement, it would be spurious, irrelevant, and uninterpretable…except that, because C14 does have an upper bound of 50,000 years, whatever number reported would be less than that, which is exactly what the creationists are trusting would happen. They’d love to hold that yardstick up against the mile long object and triumphantly announce that it’s only 36 inches long.

“Brilliant mind,” hah. That’s not a brain, it’s a dingleberry with pretensions.

Occasionally, trees will produce more than one ring in a year. The extra ring is called a false ring and it can be the result of drought stress in the middle of a growing season. Other times a tree can go a year without producing a ring. This can happen when the tree is suffering from severe stress like being burned in a fire, attacked by insects, or adverse weather conditions. When you crossdate you use a tree that doesn’t have a missing ring to find where other trees do have missing rings.

Click here for more information on crossdating

It is true that bristecone pines can occasionally produce more than one ring. As Liar Bob forgot to point out, also occasionally they don’t produce a ring at all too.

But it doesn’t effect the dating system. Because more than one tree is used to crossdate and correct for such things.

And as Liar Bob didn’t point out, there is more than one tree ring chronology that extends back before the mythological date of the fundie universe.

The decay rate of fill-in-the-blankium has changed over time. The speed of light has slowed in the last 6,000 years.

In keeping with the cross-checking of methods I mentioned earlier, whaddayaknowit, the half-lives of the various radiometric techniques are such that their effective ranges overlap.

And that means you can use one to check the other! And they all agree.

Which means that if the decay rates change with time, each one would have to change in its own unique specific way, to make them all consistent with a 6000 year old earth.

This of course has some very interesting implications, not the least of which being that the heat released by these so much faster rates of decay in the past would have meant a completely molten earth at the time of Enoch (hey, maybe that’s why he was taken up into heaven by God without having to die!).

Another being that the decay rate of Uranium would have to have been fast enough at some point within historical memory for most of our major Uranium ore deposits to have gone critical and nuked. (Explanation for Sodom and Gomorrah?) The dearth of mushroom clouds in the historical record is notable.

Per Relativity (I think), for this to have happened, photons would have to have negative mass in the past (mass which they would have to subsequently lose, until now they have no mass. And tomorrow they should gain positive mass, and move slower – hey, explains that neutrino result, ha!)

Negative mass of course means negative gravity. And a HUGE amount of negative gravity to account for a 6000 year old universe appearing to be 13.5 billion years old per astronomical observations.

The sun of course, has a lot of photons. Don’t know precisely what this would mean for the earth-sun orbital relationship back in early biblical times, when all those photons were packing MASSIVE negative mass, but it can’t possibly be good.

In America, we’re in for a long year of extra stupidity as the TeaBagger wing of the Rethuglican party courts people like Liar Bob’s YECtard followers.

Gah, it makes me ill to think that one of those ignorant-on-purpose assholes is going to be elected and ruin what remains of my country.

Here’s a long excerpt from a guest post by Jim Kakalios:

If he replied that six thousand years is closer to the true age of the Earth, I would then ask – what about cell phones?

The scientifically determined age of the Earth is not just pulled out of a hat. It is based upon measurements of the concentration of unstable uranium and thorium nuclei in rocks and meteors, employing a technique similar to Carbon-14 dating. Extracting a time since the rock’s formation from these measurements requires an understanding of quantum mechanics, the field of physics that describes the behavior of atoms and nuclei. There has been continual improvement, since the development of the first atomic bomb in 1945, in our understanding of the mechanics of radioactive decay of nuclei, with a corresponding decrease in the uncertainty of the age of the Earth, derived from such measurements.

Additionally, quantum mechanics, when combined with statistical mechanics, provides the foundation for solid-state and semiconductor physics. Modern quantum mechanics was developed in the mid-1920’s, and the transistor and laser followed approximately a generation later. There would be no computer hard drives, magnetic resonance imaging, light emitting diodes, cell phones, laptop computers or iPods without quantum mechanics.

It is of course every American’s right to dismiss the conclusions of any body of science they wish. But intellectual consistency would then suggest that one would mis-trust any electronic device that makes use of this science. At least the Amish walk the walk, and don’t just talk the talk.

[PDF]
1111 THE 12460-YEAR HOHENHEIM OAK AND PINE TREE-RING …www.wsl.ch/staff/felix.kaiser/PDFs/Friedrich_Dendro_RC04%20.pdfSimilar
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The long tree-ring chronologies of the Hohenheim laboratory are based on ….. of the bars give the calendar year (cal BC) of the oldest oak tree ring in the …

The Hohenheim Oak tree ring chronology from Europe extends back 12,360 years. Twice the age of the fundie universe.

Actually, for the most part, creationists aren’t making this point anymore (with, of course, the exceptions of a few Too-Loud-To-Hear-New-Evidence and Too-Stubborn-To-Change-My-Tactics weirdos that even mainstream YEC’ers [yes, there are those] take with a grain of salt [albeit a small, Biblically consistent, epistemologically-self-conscious grain of salt]).

Instead, they just (keep trying to) come up with new reasons we get old dates for old material. And even more often, they keep robotically repeating thoroughly debunked reasons we get old dates for old material.

Because if the material that Evil-utionistic Science says is old is actually old … then….

What, exactly?

Noah’s flood didn’t break every law of physics and melt the earth while evaporating its entire water supply multiple times? Ah, the disappointment.

God didn’t create the earth in six literal consecutive days? (He certainly could have, if he made it look 4.5 billion years old, with fossils pre-incorporated … which, for an infinitely powerful god who created matter, energy, and the rest of the universe ex nihilo, would be boringly easy.) Many christians, even creationists, have gotten along quite well with both the bible and science over the years. (Perhaps the Gen. 1 account is metaphoric, or the days are not literal, or the days are not consecutive, etc.) It isn’t exactly foundational to the christian religion.

Ussher was wrong? Dear fucking lord god jesus fucking christ … his chronology isn’t even consistent with later interpretations of the bible itself, much less ANY external evidence….

So … what the fuck problem do they have with old stuff being old?

It’s as if a business invented a niche market, monopolized it, made a killing, and started trying to sue their competitors for infringement. The absurdity goes beyond evil and beyond insanity, to the Mandelbröt fringe of conceivability….

Gah, it makes me ill to think that one of those ignorant-on-purpose assholes is going to be elected and ruin what remains of my country.

It’s not for sure but quite possible.

Given the mess Perry made of Texas and his own repulsive personality, yeah, Perry would wreck the USA. Again.

Probably we would end up in another war with Iran or Pakistan. Which we might well lose. These morons like wars for some dumb reason.

Far as I can see, the USA would be over with for what is left of my projected lifespan. I’m already making contingency plans, just in case. This involves more cats and lots of Sauvignon Blanc. And a few more hobbies.

Huh, I was reading the forward to my evolution textbook* and came across a form of evidence for evolution that’s new to me. Apparently the structure of the 1542-nucleotide-long 16S ribosomal RNA molecule was inferred from its evolutionary history by looking at which bases changed together as pairs and which bases changed alone. The inferences were later confirmed using crystals of the molecule–over 97% of predicted pairings were correct. And here’s a free paper on the topic that I haven’t read yet because I’ve procrastinated my actual homework enough, but that I will definitely be reading when I get the time: The accuracy of ribosomal RNA comparative structure models (warning: PDF).
………
*Evolution, by Barton, Briggs, Eisen, Goldstein, and Patel

It’s as if a business invented a niche market, monopolized it, made a killing, and started trying to sue their competitors for infringement. The absurdity goes beyond evil and beyond insanity, to the Mandelbröt fringe of conceivability….

My natal multi-million person Protestant sect doesn’t have a problem with science. It says right on their website that they accept evolution. Neither does the 1 billion member Catholic church. The Big Bang theory was first formulated by a Catholic priest-scientist.

Creationism is a fundie belief, not a xian belief.

It’s mostly just tribalism, ingroups versus outgroups. I doubt they really give a damn what the age of the universe is.

Which on second thought is probably patently obvious to most of you smart people … it’s just that I’ve been dealing too-closely-for-comfort with several cult-related problems in the past year or so, so running into something wacky and then realizing that it fits the “cult” label is like turning on the lights….

Which on second thought is probably patently obvious to most of you smart people … it’s just that I’ve been dealing too-closely-for-comfort with several cult-related problems in the past year or so, so running into something wacky and then realizing that it fits the “cult” label is like turning on the lights….

Yeah, it’s pretty weird to look at something that batshit and see that most people in America just take it for granted – well, they don’t all believe in YEC themselves, but they don’t dare recognize it as a “cult” because then that would invite labeling as “cult-ish” of certain bizarre beliefs of their own (mainstream) churches.

Reminds us how glad we are that you and other people like you have made your escape. Whew, what a relief to be out of cultish christianity. Sorry for you that you’re still dealing with the problems from that … I think it gets better over time.

If Enyart comes back tomorrow, he will ignore ALL substantive answers to his already posted lies, pick one post that insults him to focus on, but not even answer anything in that post, and instead he will barf up a NEW lie as if nothing had come previously.

Meh, the whole thing is arguing over an argument from ignorance. The logic to the argument to design has been refuted for about 250 years, so there’s no real point in even pretending there’s a discussion to be had.

Design arguments are utter crap, they glorify our ignorance by calling it God, and protect that ignorance at all costs.

Really you have to thank Bob and his ilk for giving really knowledgeable people the impetus (hey anger smanger as long as their impetus works to my benefit :-) ) to write things on these pages in a fashion that can enlighten even washed-up blokes like me.

Bob – I learn real and exciting intellectually honest things from PZ and such other blog owners and their commenters; YOU SHOULD TRY IT BIG BOB!!

Hey you do not have to agree with everything!

For instance I really trust PZ when it comes to pure biology but also I look for and process rebuttal comments (from honest players), and also sometimes I extend my casual independent research if all engenders lingering interest and doubts.

But even when I do not share PZ’s (for lack of better words)subjective opinions and mindset (e.g. in the case of his – TO ME – early-70’s radical feminist mindset) I gain from his posts on such topics and the discussion it propagates.

That is because I try my darnest to approach all scientifically. Now I do not mean I run out and do rigorous experiments or extensive research – no I am blissfully retired! – but that I use the arguments of others to honestly try to falsify my preconceived notions if I have any in conflict. And even if I do not have prior notions I try to add to my body of knowledge those tidbits from others that seem to have at least some “proven” validity. BTW Bob the only things you bring to the table are : (1) further insight into your warped world and (2) being a catalyst for useful facts and concepts from others (not you) that I find interesting.

That is the joy of NOT being encumbered by dogma and dogmatic thinking. New, interesting, and often very useful real “things” – even solutions to vexing problems – are there for the picking with some real scientific work and intellectual honesty.

You see Bob intellectual things do not have to be static, nor made-up, nor conserved from the past at all costs, nor mandated under pain of eternal suffering.

I skimmed the comments and a couple things stand out to me. One, the anger displayed by pretty much everyone. The anger is evidence to me that you all are not rational on this issue. It’s actually strengthened my stance on the issue at hand.

Well, people get frustrated when trying to have a debate with people who are dishonest and frequently lie or twist facts whichever way suits them. People dislike fundamentalist hatemongers like Enyart, and tend to ridicule you lot of crackpots. I can understand you take this as hostility and anger, but it is rather a mixture of ridicule and a level of distaste for the kind of people you are.

Next is all the bad language. Do you all really think that makes you sound intelligent or more like the stupid playground bully that has no brains so he bullies kids to make himself feel good? When someone wants to be respected, like in a job interview, they don’t speak like that because they will never be respected or even sound intelligent. They sound like immature fools.

Only self righteous people like you even care about the language. So to stay in style: fuck you.

Then there’s all the accusations that Bob and I are liars and deceivers and child abusers, etc., etc., etc. I would just love to know where you atheists get your standard for right and wrong. Isn’t it quite curious that you all agree in such harmony that Bob and I are wrong? How does that work exactly?

Well, the main reason is that you cannot show that you’re right. Sure, creationists are good at nitpicking on details and substituting their own reality, but you lot fail horribly at creating a coherent theory of the world around us. Mainstream science has consistency and consensus. Different branches of science are in agreement. Creationism is just a jumbled up mess. Your only tactic seems to be finding flaws in the theories where you can plug in your preferred deity. None of this goes any way to strengthen your case. Come up with a coherent testable theory of your beloved young earth that is not based in myth and circular reasoning, and someone may actually care what you have to say.

Because it’s not profitable for him to get it. His use of sciency-sounding lies and half-truths is what gets him his gullible listeners and ass-kissing producers. Nobody’d pay attention to him if it weren’t for his lies. So why bother with the truth?

Also, I think he takes a trollish pleasure in riling folks up. He’s the kid that, at 15, would tell his friends lies about each other just to watch them fight.

[Ridicule may have provoked an indirect response last time; let’s see if we can get some more data on this issue….]

I know. I did something similar: I provided an earnest response, and a response that was somewhat childish and transparent in its mockery, setting out two kinds of bait to see which might attract the elusive Lesser Dim Radiohost.

I too haz a sad. While I’ve fucked up by being too bold, I have learned from that fuck-up, making my teeth sninier. Yet they are still not yet sniny enough. And my pelt is still somewhat dull, and not as sleek as it might be.

Will Duffy seems strangely silent after his blowhard email to PZ (appropriately fonted) and his praise for the scientific mind of his earthly master, Bob Enyart. My sincere requests of Duffy have gone unanswered, to wit:

1. A transcript or link to Enyart’s remarks about Galileo in the DVD he claims to have.
2. The date of the program.
3. Any response to my debate proposal.

Perhaps Duffy is too busy fawning at the feet of his master, or maybe he’s deep in negotiations with the Nobel Prize Committee–who can tell? But if I had been instumental in stirring up so much shit, I’d feel obligated to stick around until it was cleaned up. Are we seeing the classic chess-playing pigeon here?

While we’re at it, I had a few questions myself, earlier. You know, just to set the record straight:

Are you currently employed by, invested in or otherwise financially associated with by Bob Enyart or any of his associates or organizations?
Are you receiving, or hoping to receive, any reward or compensation by Bob Enyart, or his associates or organizations, for your activities on this blog or elsewhere on the internet?

I wonder if NPR is aware of the copyright infringement that Idiot Bob is committing with his “the real science friday” show. I say hit em in the pocketbook and listen to them whine on how they are being persecuted. If you give a idiot enough rope he will eventually hang himself.

Astronomical dating is an independent method that correlates with radiometric dating back to around 100 million years ago.

Cyclostratigraphy FTW! It’s still underappreciated, and not very developed yet, but the potential is deeply impressive and increasingly put to good use.

Yes, God was awfully busy faking the various means of dating the age of the rocks, making sure that they’d agree so anyone who believes them could be sent to hell. Or it was Satan, one never knows whether it’s God or Satan with these people, since they apparently do about the same things.

QFT.

The Coconino sandstone’s sand dune strata were created by the noatic flood (Answers in Genesis makes this claim

:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D

Morons. :-D

Mandelbröt

Heh. The name is not half-Scandinavian. It’s just Mandelbrot with o. :-)

If Enyart comes back tomorrow, he will ignore ALL substantive answers to his already posted lies, pick one post that insults him to focus on, but not even answer anything in that post, and instead he will barf up a NEW lie as if nothing had come previously.

Nope.

He’ll barf up an OLD lie as if nobody had refuted it yet in this very thread and the ScienceBlogs one.

But even when I do not share PZ’s (for lack of better words)subjective opinions and mindset (e.g. in the case of his – TO ME – early-70′s radical feminist mindset)

Thing is, compared to Europe, the USA is stuck in the early 70s. It still has the problems of the early 70s; an early-70s mindset is required to solve them.

David #538: “Thing is, compared to Europe, the USA is stuck in the early 70s. It still has the problems of the early 70s; an early-70s mindset is required to solve them.”

Huum .. yes and no and the “no” is important to the equation IMHO.

By the way my original statement was not a value judgment; although I do not share PZ’s mindset thus by definition I think mine better, I remain agnostic on which is really better.

That was the point I was trying to make by example – that unless things are settled by extensive rigorous processes of discovery and testing (as in the case with ToE), or unless proposals are not falsifiable by definition (as in the case of god), the scientific approach demands agnosticism. By its very nature it tends toward honesty and accuracy because almost nothing is cast in stone.

On the contrary religion abhors agnosticism and thus is a limited “tool” for discovery or for about any intellectually useful endeavor. By its very nature it tends toward dishonesty and inaccuracy because almost everything is cast in stone. Couple that with religion’s innate mission to impose authoritarian control and you have a mixture toxic to modern society.

But back to your interesting thought provoking statement. You have a point. However when I thought about it I stumbled in my mind over this analogy: the cars of the 70’s had major problems
and the cars of today suffer problems for some of the same reasons (e.g., ridiculously stupid inadequate reliable grounding). And mechanics definitely should carry some of the mindset learned in the 70’s. However cars are different now – one could say better also – and mechanics need to have a more modern mindset (beyond just different or more knowledge). To make a point (I hope :-) ) – a good mechanic may have discarded the catalytic converted in earlier years and be justified.. today we’d think him weirdly inaccurate (let alone irresponsible) in solving a problem by doing such to a modern car.

I enjoy my ramblings – makes old brain think. But sorry to you all. My comment on your comment is that you have an interesting point David but environments are not the same and our thinking and hot points and approaches should not be exactly either IMHO.

Grand Lake and Hopi Lakes, lifted high by the Colorado Plateau, breached their natural damns, and emptied out removing 2,000 cubic miles of sediment from above the Grand Canyon, and then carved out the 800 cubic miles of the canyon itself.

What happened to this 2800 cubic miles of rock? Just to be charitable, let’s assume it was unlithified, with particle sizes like that of fine silt. How much water would it take transport 2800 cubic miles of silt? Let’s be charitable again, and assume that the slurry being transported (presumably to the sea) was 33% silt / 67% water (by weight). This would make it roughly the consistency of oatmeal.

This implies that the combined volume of the two lakes would be 5600 cubic miles. For comparison, this exceeds the combined volume of all five great lakes. Moreover, the lowest point in those two lakes must have been higher than the rim of the grand canyon, roughly 7000 feet. Being in the desert, this basin would suffer very little erosion over the 5000 years since the flood, so where is it?

Walt Brown is, to put it as charitably as possible, a dunce when compared to real scientists. (Some would say batshit crazy, but I’m trying to be nice.) But, according to Will Duffy, he is smarter than Bob Enyart, and Bob is smarter than Walt. I wouldn’t want that spread around if I were you, Walt.

Threads like this one make me happy, in a gleefully, Imma getting a free* education, dancing like a toddler sorta way.
*Well, free in the sense of not having to pay cash for it. It does cost me some time and mental effort to look up and process the stuff I don’t immediately understand.

You’re telling me! This thread, and others, are not only rich resources of knowledge, but on top of that, are also gold mines of brilliant and original insights and arguments against bible validity.

I’ve, just lately, started keeping quotes of some of these posts here. I’ll make sure I keep links to them from now on for my new book, ‘Testing Your Faith: Even Tougher Questions Than the Usual Ones That Christians Cannot Answer.’
(Hey, the title is the hardest part!)

Moreover, the lowest point in those two lakes must have been higher than the rim of the grand canyon …

Um, no. The water from the top of the lake starts eroding the top of the canyon, the last of the water from the bottom of the lake erodes the bottom of the canyon. (It’s an over-topped earthen damn a few hundred miles long.)

/pedant

The entire idea is crock, of course. There is no place for the lakes to have been, the canyon is an entrenched meander–not a run-off feature, and soft sediment would not stand up as thousand-foot-high cliffs.

You asked whether or not I would renounce Christianity, and I answered your question directly (as the Apostle Paul did in the New Testament) by saying that if it could be shown that Jesus did not rise from the dead, then Christianity would be false, and of course, in that case it should be renounced.

So you reasoned then that my Trochlea challenge is not in good faith because I wouldn’t raise it to a make-or-break level for Christianity.

Haven’t you ever challenged, or even thought to yourself, that young-earth creationists don’t publish in scientific journals, and don’t make scientific predictions? If you’ve ever done such a thing, then your challenge being met with references to published works and to confirmed predictions, would not inherently mean that your overall worldview was false, but rather, that some of your knowledge or reasoning was invalid.

So you wrote, “Then go away. Your challenge is not in good faith and would accomplish nothing by your own admission.”

You are obviously annoyed with things like someone with a PhD in nuclear physics (Canada’s Jim Mason for ex.) arguing that C14 in diamonds (and EVERYWHERE it shouldn’t be) is evidence that the diamond is not a billion years old. You’re obviously annoyed that there are hundreds of millions of people who believe that man is specially created in God’s image and not descended from ape-like creatures. I guess you believe that mocking and a priori rejecting challenges is an effective means toward the ends you aim at. If so, I’m not sure what ends you’re aiming at. Perhaps it’s not the discovery of truth, but just the approval of those who believe like you do.

Would you care to explain why you’ve been conspicuously avoiding addressing amphiox’s point in post #49 above?

You know, this one:

amphiox wrote:

To further belabor the point: C14 dating is a methodology. An experimental procedure, so named because the first and most widespread use is for dating relatively recent objects in the age range of thousands to tens of thousands of years.

…

Of course, even if you take that [carbon dating] result at face value, that’s still almost five times older than the bible says the entire universe is, and thus utterly falsifies pretty much ALL versions of young-earth creationism.

[Emphasis mine]

No?

You wouldn’t care to explain why you’ve been conspicuously avoiding addressing this point?

I guess you believe that mocking and a priori rejecting challenges is an effective means toward the ends you aim at.

Mocking is effective against mindless idiots who parrot erroneous conclusions, present no evidence for their own claims, and who never question the lies that they endlessly tell.

A priori rejection is what all creationists must practice. That’s why Bob is attacking sans substance, rather than dealing with the endless facts that indicate that the world is incredibly old.

The old earth and creationism were once considered the default positions. It’s just that nothing in geology makes sense without deep time, and nothing in life is like any known designs, save via rather partial abstractions. Neither deep time nor evolution was in the slightest bit a priori in the Western tradition, only the opposites were. Science followed the evidence, fuckwits like Bob continue with their a priori beliefs and demanding the impossible, disproving a negative regarding a purported historical event.

Bob doesn’t even know how to pretend to be intellectually honest, and arguing in good faith is a concept foreign to him.

You are obviously annoyed with things like someone with a PhD in nuclear physics (Canada’s Jim Mason for ex.) arguing that C14 in diamonds (and EVERYWHERE it shouldn’t be) is evidence that the diamond is not a billion years old.

You areI am obviously annoyed with things like someonethe vast majority of people with a PhDs in nuclear physics (which is just about everyone in the field except Canada’s Jim Mason for ex.) arguing that C14 in diamonds (and EVERYWHERE it shouldn’t be) is exactly what we would expect to see, in the concentrations we would expect to see, and therefore is not evidence that the diamond is not a billioncannot be more than six thousand years old. You’reI’m obviously annoyed that there are hundreds of millions of people who believe that man is descended from ape-like creaturesspecially created in God’s image and not descended from ape-like creaturescreated in the image of some imaginary Caucasian dude in the sky that I really, really, really want to believe exists, even though I have no evidence that he does. I guess you believe that mocking and a priori rejecting challengesusing actual evidence and scientific theories to back up your position is an effective means toward the ends you aim at. If so, I’m not sure what ends you’re aiming atgoing to be able to refute your points effectively. Perhaps it’s not the discovery of truth, but just the approval of those who believe like you doI’ll just post some more easily-refuted bullshit and avoid answering any of the hard questions people have asked on this thread.

And that’s one of the things I find so puzzling about the posting habits of Homovis minora: the fact that the one guy with a PhD who agrees with them is an expert whose credentials lend credence to their claims…

…while the vast majority of folks with PhDs who disagree with them are deluded fools whose (identical) credentials mean nothing.

Um, no. The water from the top of the lake starts eroding the top of the canyon, the last of the water from the bottom of the lake erodes the bottom of the canyon. (It’s an over-topped earthen dam a few hundred miles long.)

Right you are, I didn’t think that through. Of course, it doesn’t help Walt Brown’s case very much.

BTW, There’s a place we visited (near the skywalk) where the vertical drop is at least 3000 feet. There was no guard rail, and I couldn’t bring myself to approach the edge closer than five feet or so. It’s an eerie experience that I think our visual cortex is just not equipped to handle. (It could also be that I’m just a wimp.)

Bob, if you’re at all interested in answering any damn thing at all, why don’t you tell us how buried granite plutons cooled off in 6000 years or less. And how the ocean floors were formed from erupting magma and became cold in the portions that “just happen” to radiometrically date to millions of years old.

How did enough carbon/kerogen become fixed that it could react with several atmospheres’ worth of oxygen? How, how could that much life have existed in 6000 years or so, and how would such an enormous draw-down of carbon not totally wreck the entire carbon/oxygen cycles (and where’d all that oxygen get off to?).

Yes, we have a number of dating methods that indicate an earth far older than Bob claims, but we’re supposed to throw out multiple convergent lines (within the appropriate ranges, of course) of evidence over a bit of C-14 “measured” near the threshold of detectability, and for which there are known possibilities of production should such C-14 actually be there.

It’s the height of intellectual dishonesty. He ignores all of the convergent evidence for an old earth and has at most some questionable measurements of a substance that at least theoretically could be produced by radioactivity in the earth. Like his Wholly Babble, he can only privilege what he prefers in order to claim to have some minor amounts of evidence, since he can’t at all deal with the contrary evidence.

And still he’s preferable to the DI, because he at least doesn’t demand that evidence be altogether overthrown. For the DI, evidence for non-teleological evolution is irrelevant because we don’t know enough about “teh Designer” to say that it would make things according to known design principles, and we’re supposed to accept complexity as evidence for “Design” even though simplicity often marks out true design (a less complex vertebrate eye would result from starting it out right, because in fact it does work well, due to adaptations that reduce the effect of its backwardness).

At least Bob isn’t opposed in principle to evidence, then. He just ignores all of the evidence against, and rails at us for not accepting the meager and questionable “evidence” that could possibly be not entirely explained as yet (probably is–namely, that it’s artifactual). As horribly dishonest as that is, it’s not quite as dishonest as ID.

You are obviously annoyed with things like someone with a PhD in nuclear physics (Canada’s Jim Mason for ex.) arguing that C14 in diamonds (and EVERYWHERE it shouldn’t be) is evidence that the diamond is not a billion years old.

No. You are an idiot. Many of the commenters on this blog are, in fact, Ph.D.’s and MD’s.

You are dealing with people far more educated, intelligent, and honest than yourself. You are just too stupid to figure it out.

A few science Ph.D.s are creationists. They freely admit it is for religious cult reasons. The numbers are small, less than 1% of all scientists in relevant fields. And not important. You can find more scientists in mental hospitals and substance abuse treatment programs.

What we don’t like are liars and crackpots like yourself. Nobody but other liars and crackpots do.

In this context it’s a form of lying, even if you’re too stupid to understand that. IOW, you’re either lying that you know what you claim to know, or you’re flat out lying about the evidence.

A layperson often gets a pass on the lying charge because such an individual hasn’t willfully ignored the many good objections raised against your wholly intellectually dishonest enterprise. You continue to ignore whatever doesn’t fit your targeted “conclusion,” in an entirely bad-faith and dishonest manner.

PhD in nuclear physics (Canada’s Jim Mason for ex.) arguing that C14 in diamonds (and EVERYWHERE it shouldn’t be) is evidence that the diamond is not a billion years old.

That’s amazing, Bob. Can you provide me a link to the peer-reviewed article in which Jim Mason published this groundbreaking finding? I’m sure he made it to the cover of Nature.

Unfortunately, his biography page at Creation Ministries only mentions a couple of forty-years-old articles published in the “Canadian Journal of Physics”. You should tell them to update his CV to include these incredible new discoveries.

Can you provide me a link to the peer-reviewed article in which Jim Mason published this groundbreaking finding?

Listen, when you will Darwin-worshiping scientism-practicing big-pharma shilling people understand. All science journals are part of the anti-god conspiracy, and are completely biased in favor of evidence and repeatable experimentation!

You are obviously annoyed with things like someone with a PhD in nuclear physics (Canada’s Jim Mason for ex.) arguing that C14 in diamonds (and EVERYWHERE it shouldn’t be) is evidence that the diamond is not a billion years old.

After failing to find a SCIENTIFIC paper in the peer reviewed literature by Mr. Mason, I presume all he did was publish an opinion in the religious (creationist) literature. I’m not impressed, as any delusional fool like you or Mr. Mason can think a book of mythlogy/fiction trumps real science. It doesn’t, and a degree doesn’t mean infallibility, especially for a religious delusional fool.

You are obviously annoyed with things like someone with a PhD in nuclear physics (Canada’s Jim Mason for ex.) arguing that C14 in diamonds (and EVERYWHERE it shouldn’t be) is evidence that the diamond is not a billion years old.

The question is, what does that say about the rest of the evidence that the earth is billions of years old?

This is called anomaly-hunting; finding something that cannot be explained, while ignoring the preponderance of evidence in the other case. It’s a typical creationist ploy, they’ll picked something that cannot be explained currently and think that somehow that shows that all the other evidence is fake. It’s like bringing up that there’s some part of the eye that doesn’t have a Darwinian account as a way of trying to argue for an Intelligent Designer.

Oh, and Enyart, still no evidence for your imaginary creator, or that your babble is anything other than mythology/fiction. I would be spending more time defending that, as it really shows your ignorance, delusional thinking, and idiocy that you don’t.

You are obviously annoyed with things like someone with a PhD in nuclear physics (Canada’s Jim Mason for ex.) arguing that C14 in diamonds (and EVERYWHERE it shouldn’t be) is evidence that the diamond is not a billion years old.

argument from authority?

check.

You’re obviously annoyed that there are hundreds of millions of people who believe that man is specially created in God’s image and not descended from ape-like creatures.

argumentum ad populum?

check.

I guess you believe that mocking and a priori rejecting challenges is an effective means toward the ends you aim at.

You’re obviously annoyed that there are hundreds of millions of people who believe that man is specially created in God’s image and not descended from ape-like creatures.

I don’t know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo.Faith and Foolishness

Fuck, I can’t find the quote I’m looking for, but basically it said that if scientific discovery hadn’t been suppressed and ostracized by religion trying to maintain the credibility of it’s myth, Columbus would have been landing on the moon, not a new continent.

You are obviously annoyed with things like someone with a PhD in nuclear physics (Canada’s Jim Mason for ex.) arguing that C14 in diamonds (and EVERYWHERE it shouldn’t be) is evidence that the diamond is not a billion years old.

Still, even if true, a diamond 20 000 to 60 000 years old, or 4 to 10 times older than creation theory says the entire universe is.

And therefore a direct, complete, and total refutation of creation theory.

I take it you’ll be recanting creationism now, Bob, seeing as you continue to bring up this point?

Hey, kids, do you what day is today? That’s right, today is “Real” “Science” Friday! Your good friends Bobby and Freddy are here to explain the correct way to “interpret” science.

I was a bit disappointed with the show, though. He restricted himself to reading his own first three comments, and saying that PZ answered “I don’t know” to his amazing challenge. I’m sure Bob could have found one comment among these 500 that wasn’t so filled with “hatred, filth and vulgarity” that he couldn’t read it to his audience. After all, your audience are used to reading the Bible, aren’t they?

Nevertheless, there were some entertaining moments, such as when Fred called PZ Myers a “New Age atheist“, and was swiftly corrected by Bob. (Sadly, Fred, I can imagine why Bob invited you to his show. He looks intelligent next to you. No, Fred, that was not a compliment.) There was also the argument that evolution is false because animals other than the chimpanzee were found to use tools: ““We are closer to crows, closer to bees, closer to sponges, closer to everything but apes these days.”

Bob also tell us about some dinosaur he calls “Nebraskasaurus”, whose finding was published at “physorg.com and elsewhere”. His site won’t link to what exactly what he’s talking about, but I think it is this little fellow. It happens that Fred is amused at the fact that this science outreach article explains to the public that 200 grams are approximately the weight of three chicken eggs. Ah, but wise Bob has the explanation: “They believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs, so that’s why they’re measuring the weight of this thing in chicken eggs.” I don’t think so, Bob. I think it is you who can’t tell the difference between the peer-reviewed literature and the newspaper article.

Last, but not least, I wish good luck to Bob Enyart, who must collect $10,000 till midnight to reach the target of his “Telethon”. I know you can do it, Bob! Just tell your coreligionists that they’ll be left behind if they don’t buy your certified “scientific” DVDs. Or that Jesus is coming tomorrow and they must get rid of all their mundane possessions. Use your creativity, Bob!

Not surprisingly, I think your answer falls short, but perhaps PZ would agree with me. He showed more caution saying, “I don’t know” (for unlike many who comment, PZ has something to lose, since he is not anonymous). Your submission:

Ape: …it need not have been fully functional in its current form.

Yes, that’s exactly what neo-Darwinism posits, so let’s see where that leads…

Ape: It may simply have been a muscle pulling at the eye.

Great so far. (Especially when it pulls in a beneficial way.)

Ape: Once you have a muscle as such in place it is not hard to imagine that a bony prominence…

Well, it can’t just be a mutation that causes the bony orb to malform, because the trochlea is not bone but cartilage. So, perhaps however many generations you have assumed that it would take to start mutating such a prominence:
– you can multiply that by some appropriate factor given that a random mutation is going to have to regulate the introduction of a different tissue type in the orb;
– and then you might use another factor to estimate the additional number of generations during which you get a usable tissue type;
– and then another factor to estimate the number of generations for a mutation to begin the prominence in a location that might help the superior oblique muscle (initially arriving at a beneficial location, of course, without the aid of natural selection, since we agree that NS can only help preserve an existing benefit)
So then, I’m with you, you’re positing a series of mutations that have begun to introduce a new tissue type that is gradually malforming the orb.

Ape: …it is not hard to imagine that a bony prominence trapping the tendon might have significantly improved its functionality.

OK. Imagining things is a mechanism that sometimes leads to real discoveries, but of course it’s not the stuff of scientific evidence. So I’ll continue to go along with you, although it would be awfully hard for you or a billion other parents to imagine how a mutational bony growth in your own newborn child’s orb might significantly improve his vision system. But be that as it may…

Ape: Subsequently the prominence could have evolved into a full ring and the attachments of the muscle could have changed to maximize the effect.

Here’s where you and I go sideways. Yes, in your view, as PZ estimates, you’ve got about 50 million years for these things to occur. But remember, just like the original origin of life with all its requisite components, you might have a billion years to play with, but all the wildly improbable particulars have to happen, not over a billion years, but all within a tiny geographical area and all within a narrow time frame (that is, all unlikely particulars arising reasonably concurrent with all other unlikely particulars). So too, the muscle you posit has to be undergoing it’s significant change at the same time that the trochlea evolved, and it must be re-routed, before all those relentless mutations continue to morph that cartilage, close in the hole, etc.

The Darwinian camp prominently argued long ago that evolution could never create wheels or magnets, because neither would be of any value unless they actually worked, and of course once biologist found wheels and magnets in creatures everywhere, that method of falsification was dropped. So you’re positing that the malformed portion of the orb continued to mutate until if formed a hollowed-out ring. I’ve done my share of design work and coding, and I know that to get a belt-shaped muscle that was attached to the eye and to an anchor point:
– to re-route itself through a loop, and
– to narrow itself, at the appropriate segment, to a cord, and
– to widen itself back to a belt, and
– to move the anchor point to a location that enables the pulley to provide an actual advantage (the pulley must change the angle to be of benefit),
that all this will require a non-trivial re-write in the DNA instruction set.

Hundreds if not thousands of non-directed, individually insignificant, changes in the genome would be required before their combined effect could bring about the rerouting of the muscle through the newly hollowed-out loop into an improved configuration. The insignificance of hundreds of those prerequisite individual mutations, like bits of code in a function, would be invisible to natural selection (e.g., some of the mutations that are gradually moving the muscle’s anchor site; or some of the mutations working toward a segment of the muscle narrowing, prior to the completion of the system where that narrowing was threaded through the loop). And so while Natural Selection could select for the functioning configuration, NS could not help those discrete point mutations build upon one another, retaining some, and discarding others, because of the likely thousands of point mutations necessary to effect significant functional change, thus the majority of tiny steps along the way would be invisible to any selection advantage.

Ape, as far as the trochlea configuration being poor engineering, at Real Science Friday we’ve made a prediction that Richard Dawkins will never again claim that the human eye is wired backward. (With all the attention that claim generated, now there’s a realization that an octopus doesn’t end up being nearly blinded by sunlight, as we do; and that the overlay of blood vessels enables the rapid rebuilding of cells damaged by the temporary blindness of a flashbulb, etc.; and that the vessels protect us from ultraviolet; and the astounding efficiency of the information transfer from each photon; etc.) So Ape, if the brilliance of the wiring of the human eye can be so easily overlooked by the bias of wanting to see poor design, and as a million regulatory regions of DNA were viewed as Junk by the bias of wanting to see junk, I expect that your claim of poor engineering here is likely not a result of a comprehensive engineering analysis but rather of a bias leading you to see junk where you want to see junk. I assert that the trochlea performs it’s function very well.

So too with criticism of the length and course of nerves (as though this wouldn’t also argue against 450 million years of not being fine-tuned via NS, in countless species no less). For as the criticisms work their way through the collective thought of the anatomists, gradually important and initially over-looked design and development requirements and functions become evident. (E.g. Dawkins and Coyne on the recurrent laryngeal nerve: did they consult Gray’s Anatomy before their criticisms, and did they consider that the embryonic heart had to sink into it’s final location in the chest, bringing along it’s nerve complex?) And yes, the genetic load of more than a hundred additional mutations per generation causes breakdown and suffering. That should be obvious to both sides of the debate.

You ask about whether Will Duffy treats Jews and Hindus like “zombies he can freely lie and cheat because they have no sense of right and wrong?”

I’ve known Will for many years. I’ve never seen him throw venom at anyone, but I’ve seen you do so, and I’ve only been aware of you for a few days. Like me I’m sure, Will would have a special love and concern for the folks you’ve mentioned, “Jews and Hindus,” being far more kind and thoughtful toward them as a matter of habit than you show yourself to be toward Christians.

There was also the argument that evolution is false because animals other than the chimpanzee were found to use tools
BOB ENYART IS A LIAR AND A CHILD ABUSER.

While the FACT that BOB ENYART IS A LIAR AND A CHILD ABUSER is an established FACT, the FACT is that just because BOB ENYART IS A LIAR AND A CHILD ABUSER does not mean only that BOB ENYART IS A LIAR AND A CHILD ABUSER and nothing else, the FACT may be that BOB ENYART IS A LIAR AND A CHILD ABUSER AND A CON ARTIST, SHYSTER WITH A MICRO-PHALLUS.
Tool usage is almost universal and is in FACT a facilitater of evolution via reproduction.

The Darwinian camp prominently argued long ago that evolution could never create wheels or magnets, because neither would be of any value unless they actually worked, and of course once biologist found wheels and magnets in creatures everywhere, that method of falsification was dropped.

Bob Enyart, how is your argument anything other than an argument from ignorance? You can keep talking about how Darwinian evolution cannot produce form X, but that objection shows a designer just as much as saying that chance can’t do it or that Lamarkian processes can’t do it. So even if you’re correct that the eye can’t evolve by Darwinian means, all that does is leave us with the fact that we don’t know. So even if you are correct in your assessment of the biology and the research paradigm, the best you have is that there’s no explanation.

Do you really think that the best thing that you can do for God is to make Him a substitute for human ignorance. Victory by not having a good explanation, that’s hardly something worthy of worship – don’t you think? Or perhaps you do, because the logic of the argument you are presenting doesn’t get you to any God worthy of the name.

The logic of the design argument has been shown to be wanting for some 250 years now; that there are scientific explanations doesn’t mean that design is any less wanting if only scientific explanations could be shown wrong. All you are doing is glorifying ignorance!

I’ve been asking evolutionists to list ways to theoretically falsify Darwinism for years. The theory seems to be so elastic as to be able to embrace any conceivable data, and as such, it may not even qualify as a theory. But you’ve implied that there’s even something more specific than I’ve been asking for, a potential falsification of the evolution of the trochlea! As you’ve written:

nTB: Current evolutionary theory at least gives a verifiable, falsifiable mechanism by which features like the trochlea develop.

That’s great. Can you describe how the evolution of the trochlea could be falsified? I’d greatly appreciate it! (And if nigelTheBold isn’t around any longer, perhaps someone else could reach him or answer this for him. Thanks.)

The theory seems to be so elastic as to be able to embrace any conceivable data, and as such, it may not even qualify as a theory.

So, do you think if we came across a cat giving birth to a dog that would sit with evolutionary theory? Do you think that if we came across a crocoduck, that would sit with evolutionary theory? Do you think that the genetic sequence for a gene shared by all animals showed no pattern of common descent, that would sit well with evolutionary theory? Do you think if we found fossil rabbits in the precambrian, that would sit well with evolutionary theory? What about a pig with born with wings? What about lion fossils in Australia or kangaroo fossils found in Germany?

There’s plenty of conceivable data that would falsify evolutionary theory…

Cool name. But I’m still wondering, after your comments about my debate with Eugenie Scott, if you’re willing to answer this question I put to you:

So TH, on just this ONE POINT of the debate, would you agree that the creationist point was closer to “reality,” as I argued, that IT WAS TOO EARLY IN GENETIC SCIENCE TO SYSTEMATICALLY DISCOUNT THE NON-CODING SEGMENTS OF DNA AS JUNK? Who was right on that ONE POINT TH, the creationist, or the evolutionist?

Actually, what the hell is Bob Enyart even arguing? As far as I can tell, it seems he’s arguing that evolutionists keep changing their minds about what evolution can and cannot do as more knowledge comes in. And somehow from that, Creation?

Cool name. But I’m still wondering, after your comments about my debate with Eugenie Scott, if you’re willing to answer this question I put to you:

So TH, on just this ONE POINT of the debate, would you agree that the creationist point was closer to “reality,” as I argued, that IT WAS TOO EARLY IN GENETIC SCIENCE TO SYSTEMATICALLY DISCOUNT THE NON-CODING SEGMENTS OF DNA AS JUNK? Who was right on that ONE POINT TH, the creationist, or the evolutionist?

YOU were wrong, you ignoramus. Creationists were, and still are, wrong on that ONE POINT, and on every other point as well where you disagree with mainstream science. Even Christians who are honest – unlike you – can witness that science is right when they are not enslaved by your Bibliolatry.

Grow up and join the hundreds of millions of Christians who live in the real world with us.

I really hope Bob Eynart will take the time to outline his position clearly and concisely, because as far as I can tell his argument comes down to “if it looks designed, there’s a designer” and “Darwinian evolution isn’t really a proper explanation because scientists always change their minds”.

Help me out here, Bob, because it’s hard to see just what it is you’re arguing for.

Who was right on that ONE POINT TH, the creationist, or the evolutionist?

The evolutionist.

About 60-70% of the non-coding DNA is definitively junk (in humans – in onions, it’s higher). They are the fossilized detritus of evolutionary processes – broken copies of old viral genes, duplicated pseudogenes, parasitic jumping genes, and various long and short repeating segments that don’t anything but repeat themselves.

A tiny fracture of this junk has been found, in a few species, to have later acquired new, novel functions. These examples are so few that you can’t even assign a percentage to it.

About 1% of the non-coding DNA has been found to have regulatory function, and extrapolating from what we know from these, it is hypothesized that, at most, all the non-coding DNA with regulatory function, when it is discovered, will constitute no more than 5-10% of the non-coding DNA.

The rest we currently have no idea what it does, if anything.

No matter which way you slice it, though, the majority of the non-coding DNA is junk.

The Darwinian camp prominently argued long ago that evolution could never create wheels or magnets, because neither would be of any value unless they actually worked,

Assume just for argument that they did.

Evolution has not produced any macroscopic wheel that rotates fully freely around an axle. The only examples of evolved freely rotating wheels are molecular.

Evolution has never created a magnet. Evolution has, indeed, learned to use magnets, by taking in grains of minerals that are already magnetic from the environment. Use and create are not the same thing.

I have always tried to figure out why it is that the Bob Enyarts of this world keep doing what they are doing. Sure, there is money in it, if you can get some losers to believe you, but still … It would be nicer to look a little deeper.

A good line of reasoning I’ve run into is by a guy called Pierre Bourdieu (Pfft), who indicates that in playing the [religious] social feild one can accumulate social capital. It is not necessary to go straight for the cash, because you can use your “social currency” (in the form of influence or social power) to obtain the things you want. Often these are not pecuniary.

To Bob, religion is a means to acquire social capital from amongst the unwashed and the gormless (It is not worth much in each case but it does accumulate if you can find enough bozos. Getting real intellectual support would be pay-dirt.)

I give Pierre the stage:

social capital is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.

Bob and his ilk are trying to make social currency by way of religion. Their gold standard is the bible. If it has no value they are by implication destitute. If only their poor suckers would scrape away the gilt and see the tacky baubles they have bought into.

and did they consider that the embryonic heart had to sink into it’s final location in the chest, bringing along it’s nerve complex?

Why did the Designer design an embryonic heart that had to sink into it’s final location, dragging a long a nerve complex unnecessarily?

now there’s a realization that an octopus doesn’t end up being nearly blinded by sunlight, as we do

That would suggest that the octopus’ way of wiring it’s retina is superior to ours, doesn’t it?

If our eyes, which are same as the eyes used by the fish that live in the same environment as the octopus, are not wired backwards, then the octopus’ eyes ARE wired backwards. If the octopus’ eyes are NOT wired backwards, then OUR eyes ARE.

So why did the Designer not design our eyes the way it designed the Octopus’ eye, or the Octopus’ eye the way it designed ours? Why did it bother with two separate designs for the same thing?

and that the overlay of blood vessels enables the rapid rebuilding of cells damaged by the temporary blindness of a flashbulb, etc.

The exact same function could have been achieved by putting the blood vessels on the back side behind the photoreceptor cells rather than in front.

And why didn’t the Designer design more durable cells and photopigments, that wouldn’t need such rapid rebuilding?

and that the vessels protect us from ultraviolet

The vessels also predispose us to blindness from retinal hemorrhage.

And if the Designer had just designed better cells and photopigments, they wouldn’t need to be protected from UV. They would already be resistant to it. So why didn’t it?

your conviction cannot be based on anything he’s posted in this thread.

It’s just the principle of charity. Bob Enyart should be given the opportunity to articulate his argument and position clearly and concisely, so that we can better understand precisely what he’s arguing for. If he doesn’t, well, that shows the poverty of his position. An intelligent person should be able to articulate a basic outline of what they’re arguing for, and as YesYouNeedJesus put it: “Bob is one of the most brilliant scientific minds I’ve ever listened to.”

The trochlea, for all it’s clever contrivance, wouldn’t have been necessary at all if the superior oblique muscle had been designed properly.

If the trochlea is, indeed, designed, then the superior oblique muscle must not have been designed.

If the superior oblique muscle had, indeed, been designed, then the trochlea should not exist, as it would have been unnecessary.

It doesn’t matter if we don’t yet know precisely how the trochlea evolved. The trochlea and the superior oblique muscle, when taken together, only make sense as evolved structures. They do NOT make any sense as designed structures.

Though if I were a betting man (I am not, for the record), I’d put money on what I said in #297: that any attacks on evolution are merely a foil for his belief in God. And no matter whether or not evolution is good science or supported by the empirical evidence, ultimately that’s in conflict with the authority of the bible and with all that follows from being handmade by a loving and personal Creator.

Bob reminds me of the story by Mark Twain called “The Million Pound Bank Note.” (Pfft), where the impoverished main protagonist is given a million pound note and must make his way through the world. As he cannot cash the note (people would not trust him to have that money) he must try and sell the idea that his actions are backed up by all that cash.

The wealthy sponsor of the experiment suggests:

… that the mere possession of this symbol of wealth will enable anyone to have anything he wants, without actually cashing the note.

Substitute “jeebus and skydaddy” for the banknote and you will see the game they are playing. Only thing is there is no “banknote” in Bob’s pocket. Things only go well for him when people play along with his silly ruse.

………………
Ok, this is completey off topic, but I love Mark Twain. Growing up, he had expected to earn a huge sum of money for family land. Decades later it turned out that the land was useless. It was extremely upsetting for him to realise how he had put his life on hold for the promise of riches down the road. The experience got him to write: “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today”.

Perhaps Bob and Co. will wake up one day and make a similar realisation. I suggest the title of their book is: “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Jeeebus.”

<blockquoteIt doesn’t matter if we don’t yet know precisely how the trochlea evolved. The trochlea and the superior oblique muscle, when taken together, only make sense as evolved structures. They do NOT make any sense as designed structures.

This is part of modern Christian Sophisticated Theology(tm).

God made the world, he’s the perfect being in all senses of the word, but he is a really crap engineer/designer.

Bob Bob Bob.. you are getting owned man – wake up dude. I trust in your judo matches being so dominated you have sense enough to tap-out – you must – you are still alive.

Bob your arguments are so patently perverted in their facts and logic, so patently vacuous, and you so resistant to standing corrected when presented with the corrections, that people expert in the subject matter can only conclude that you are (1) Stupid (which seems unlikely) and/or (2) Crazy (perhaps) and/or (3) A Clever Bold Charlatan (my vote as predominant).

I got to hand it to you – seriously. You craft statements chock full of truthiness with lots of sciency sounding stuff. You are a master – and that is a serious compliment even though I abhor what you do (feed on the gullible).

But as I said before: Bob you know jargon, tidbits, and how to construct a pleasing populist position statement. That is NOT science in operation.

If you are so sure you have the keys to the Truth (scientifically) then use the process and rock the World. Publish your rigorous work in accredited journals. Go to Harvards of the World and work in their labs with the PhD’s there and show them the light. I have been around such people for many years and after you get through a bit of their arrogance they are like kids so eager to learn and discover. You can feign the excuses .. but we know they are not real. If you have something to say legitimately and can present it honestly via the process of science you WILL be heard and respected – even if your work is ultimately found in error.

If you can really correct at least 150 years of science and countless scientists dead and alive the riches and glory that will accrue to you will make your current life seem guttural.

Go for it Bob — but I warn you, if the above is your best material you best not quit your day job.

So TH, on just this ONE POINT of the debate, would you agree that the creationist point was closer to “reality,” as I argued, that IT WAS TOO EARLY IN GENETIC SCIENCE TO SYSTEMATICALLY DISCOUNT THE NON-CODING SEGMENTS OF DNA AS JUNK? Who was right on that ONE POINT TH, the creationist, or the evolutionist?

Three things, Bobby:

1. hen3ry answered this in #177.

2. One of the beauties of science is it’s self-correcting. If something is found to be wrong, then science discards it and goes with the new information. It’s only religion which pretends to have Absolute Truth™.

3. I’m not a biologist, I’m an economist. I’m not qualified to argue about junk DNA. I can explain why going back to the gold standard is a terrible idea but, unlike you, I recognize that I don’t know enough about biology to discuss it in detail.

Anyway, now that I’ve replied to your question to me, how about answering my question to you? Why is it creationists reject reality in favor of a 2,500 year old Babylonian creation myth?

I feel slighted. I go to all the trouble of writing post 430 in a civil tone (See? not a single cussword or gratuitous insult) and you snub me. And after all we’ve been through together. I was good for about 10 minutes of your air time back in 1997, and this is the thanks I get. Tsk, tsk.

The post made a simple point, and if that point is valid, your challenge to PZ is without value or merit. I’ll summarize that point to refresh your memory:

Saying “I don’t see how X could happen.” doesn’t mean X cannot happen. The argument from incredulity has been shown to be worthless time and time again. The most notable example is the bacterial flagellum, once held by creationists to be entirely inexplicable. Now we know of at least one very plausible route for its evolution.

Let me ask you a question: if PZ could show you exactly how the trochlea evolved, step by step, would you then give up young earth creationism and accept evolution? If the answer is no, then why should you be taken seriously? I hazard to guess that if PZ did that, you would simply go find another hoop and challenge him to jump through that one. So, the challenge is just a dishonest rhetorical device.

Regarding Haldane’s offer of wheels and magnets as components that would falsify evolution, because neither would be of value until they reasonably functioned in those capacities, you wrote that Sarfati:

Phalacrocorax: Sarfati …attributes it to J. B. S. Haldane… on page 90, while Google says the book is only 56 pages long.

Why should we care if google gives the wrong number of pages to a book? Also J.B.S. Haldane died 45 years ago. Why should we care about something he allegedly said? Here’s a hint, science, including biology and evolutionary theory, have moved on in 45 years. A concept held by a biologist, however eminent, 45 years ago could easily be superseded. Science isn’t like religion, if new evidence is discovered, then science changes. Religion is the only pastime which clings to 2,500 year old creation myths and pretends they’re still valid.

Bobenyart, I’m still not seeing any conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary creator, and inerrant babble. The only conclusion is that both idiocies are presuppositions on your part, based on circular reasoning God proves babble which proves god which proves babble ad nauseum. That is not a logical process, and you much choose one, either your imaginary creator or your mythical/fictional babble, to provide conclusive physical evidence for. We are still waiting for you to answer this “gottcha” of ours. Until then, you have been had, refuted absolutely, and proven to be an ignorant asshat.

The text of the debate, “Is evolution a myth” with Haldane is not online, but from my notes, here’s more of the context from Haldane’s reply to Douglas Dewar on p. 90:

Haldane: “There are, of course, difficulties in the theory of evolution. … I agree with you that some processes, such as the evolution of the mammalian ear bones, probably occurred by sudden leaps. … It is never, however, necessary to postulate a leap which would imply prevision by a designer. That is why one finds no example of various mechanisms, such as the wheel and magnet, which would be useless till fairly perfect.”

Phalacrocorax, even monarch butterflies use magnetism to navigate from Canada to Mexico.

And at KGOV.com/caterpillar we discuss the problem for evolution to explain an insect like the caterpillar getting the biological urge to liquefy itself, with the only hope for species survival being to re-create itself (as it turns out, into a butterfly). Neo-Darwinism’s primary tools (although it could bring some others to bear also) to accomplish this change would have to come from mutations and natural selection. Why wouldn’t you think that the chrysalis stage is an impassible gulf? Evolutionary mechanisms have a hard time turning fruit flies into anything but fruit flies, and here, they would have to intervene to prevent a species-wide mass suicide once the mutations to liquidate oneself start to set in. A caterpillar digests itself, turning itself into a “bag of rich fluid,” and then forming all new tissue and organs, including wings, legs, antennae, heart, muscles and nervous system, building a brand new organism. That self-digesting process, a Chrysalis divide, is wildly complex and there would have to be a survivability path 100% of the way through that stage from the beginning for the species itself to survive. No?

Bob, being a dishonest imbecile, appeals to authority, and takes the claim out of context as well. Many people rather better than Bob (doesn’t take much) have taken the matter out of context as well, such as the source above, but no one who said that evolution couldn’t make a good wheel was talking about flagella, a very different “engineering realm” where things operate very differently from an automobile’s wheels.

As far as magnets go, I don’t actually know why anyone would say nature couldn’t make those. Whether the ones we find in nature actually count in context could no doubt be disputed, yet it appears likely enough that birds have quantum mechanical magnets operating in their little heads. Why chemistry under the operation of evolution couldn’t get to that I most certainly don’t know, it’s the realm within which evolution is quite competent.

Indeed, blind stupid evolution seems less stupid than Bob with all of his idiotic and dishonest blithering.

Another inane and useless argument from authority, superseded by this, which contains those pesky and still unrefuted peer reviewed scientific papers, that have progressed mightily in the last fifty years, and is growing by leaps and bounds. Chemical Abstracts alone abstracts over a million papers a year. Your static and outdated book of mythology/fiction generates no new information. It can’t. Lies in, lies out.

You know what evolution can’t do? Take anything from another organism without lateral transfer of genes.

That is to say, rather than “designing” bird or bat wings from something intelligent, like pterosaur wings, bird and bat wings are modifications of their ancestors’ forelimbs. That’s a Bob Enyart level of stupidity, no matter how wonderful, say, bird wings eventually became.

And that’s how appallingly stupid Bob’s God is. Every bit as stupid as evolution or Bob.

Facts like these are what Bob is just smart enough to avoid while he carefully quotemines and takes issues out of context. He’s smart enough to be disgustingly stupid, not smart enough to deal with the colossal failure life is as a matter of design. It is merely slavishly derivative, something utterly stupid for any brain to effect, but all that evolution is capable of doing.

A caterpillar digests itself, turning itself into a “bag of rich fluid,” and then forming all new tissue and organs, including wings, legs, antennae, heart, muscles and nervous system, building a brand new organism. That self-digesting process, a Chrysalis divide, is wildly complex and there would have to be a survivability path 100% of the way through that stage from the beginning for the species itself to survive. No?

This. Is. Not. Even. Wrong.

If a non biologist is laughing at you, imagine the reaction of someone with who knows about the subject.

You are like a person who is arguing with an architect that a skyscraper can be built with sand in the middle of a bog.

The only people who are persuaded by you are people who value faith in your deity over actual knowledge.

Haldane: “There are, of course, difficulties in the theory of evolution. … I agree with you that some processes, such as the evolution of the mammalian ear bones, probably occurred by sudden leaps. … It is never, however, necessary to postulate a leap which would imply prevision by a designer. That is why one finds no example of various mechanisms, such as the wheel and magnet, which would be useless till fairly perfect.”

The Darwinian camp J. B. S. Haldane prominently argued is quoted in an obscure Creationist book long ago from 1949 as saying that evolution could never create wheels or magnets, because neither would be of any value unless they actually worked

Much better, isn’t it?

Phalacrocorax, even monarch butterflies use magnetism to navigate from Canada to Mexico.

I’m quite sure they can sense magnetic fields, Bob. I’m not so sure about what this has to do with anything else.

And at KGOV.com/caterpillar we discuss the problem for evolution to explain an insect like the caterpillar getting the biological urge to liquefy itself

Been there, and, if I were you, I’d move the “Caterpillar proves God” page somewhere a little less visible. Placing a link to it right in the front page is a put-off to the casual visitor who is not looking for crazy sites.

Janine said:

Centuries from now, true christians will erect statues that commemorate your intellectual bravery and how you turned biology back on the godly source.

That’s give or take a million years or so, if not longer. By the time of the heat death of the universe*, we promise.

*The decay time for a supermassive black hole of roughly one galaxy-mass (10¹¹ solar masses) due to Hawking radiation is in the order of 10¹ᵒᵒ years, so entropy can be produced until at least that time.

There you go again spouting off things that any real expert would laugh at and making like you are on to something.

But let us say you are for argument’s sake. Let’s propose that there is not any evolutionary mechanism that could possibly account for a larvae (caterpillar) to the pupa (chrysalis) to butterfly metamorphosis. That it defies all logic, reason, chemistry, and physics to attribute that phenomena’s existence to the T of E.

Given that:

(1) Seems like it would be a obvious problem to many scientists and profound enough problem in T of E that a substantial number of very reputable practicing biologists would be eager to explore it. So your finding allies to help you publicize this monumental problem that would take down the T of E properly should be easy as pie.

Do you have these allies? Why not? This is big stuff!!

(2) When you firmly take down the current foundation of Biology and show its shallowness through this one but profound problem (again I say for sake of argument) what other mechanism do/would you and your major scientist allies propose.

Do you have one in mind? One that has the combined confirmation from multiple disciplines like T of E currently has (before you and your scientist allies blew all that out of the water)?

Go for it Bob – if you have the juice why not – I mean again the riches and glory are there for the taking if you are on to something. Really if you are right and can prove it – wow – your name will never be forgotten throughout time and by all. What is stopping you?

Police arrest parents of girl who died in rain, cold
SEATTLE – A 13-year-old girl who died of hypothermia earlier this year was systematically starved, beaten, forced to use an outdoor toilet and sometimes locked in a dark closet for days by her adoptive parents, according to court documents released Friday.

Larry P. Williams and Carri D. Williams of Sedro Woolley were arrested on Thursday and booked into Skagit County Jail for investigation of homicide by abuse and assault of a child in the first degree. Each is being held on $500,000 bail.

The Williams’ adoptive daughter, Hana Williams, was found dead in May – naked, in her own backyard – after she had spent much of a cold, rainy day outside as a punishment, according to court documents.

Hana had been adopted from Ethiopia deleted for length.

Other punishments included locking Hana inside a dark closet for hours or days without food while the parents played the Bible on tape and Christian music for her while she was locked inside, according to court documents.

Hana also was forced to sleep in the barn on some nights or kept outside for hours in the cold without adequate clothing or shoes, court documents say – but she was allowed to wear shoes if there was snow on the ground.

The Williams also confirmed that they used a flexible plumbing tool as a switch to punish Hana and some of the other children in their household.

A witness told investigators that the Williams got their ideas for the disciplinary measures from a book, “How to Train Up Your Child,” which recommends switchings with a plumbing tool, cold water baths, withholding food and putting children out in cold weather as forms of punishment.My note This is Michael Pearl’s book, a fundie xian pastor. It’s killed several kids already.

Howard Cooper, a retired pastor who said the Williams and their children sometimes attended worship services at his church, said he had no idea abuse was going on inside the home.

“The coccyx is NOT a vestigial bone, there is no such thing. Actually, there are various IMPORTANT MUSCLES, LIGAMENTS AND TENDONS that connect to the coccyx. Without it, human beings WOULD NOT BE CAPABLE OF LEANING BACKWARDS. People who damage their coccyx suffer from a condition of EXTREME PAIN. This would NOT BE TRUE if the coccyx served no purpose. Disregarding these facts, Darwinists insist on telling us that the coccyx is a residue of human evolution. Well, tell me, Mr. Smartypants Evolutionist, if the tailbone is vestigial HOW COULD IT HAVE EVOLVED? HA, IT MAKES NO SENSE!

“Moreover, the coccyx displays all the FEATURES OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN. It consists of up to FIVE BONY SEGMENTS that must be fused in THE RIGHT SHAPE at the RIGHT TIME! Any mistake and all this process FALLS APART! The growth of the coccyx is so complex that it requires the timely activation of THOUSANDS OF GENES. In short, the coccyx’s development is such a powerful evidence of design that it could be called ‘GOD’S BONE’.

“This is why I hereby propose THE GOD’S BONE CHALLENGE. I will pay 5 TRILLION DOLLARS to any evolutionist who can provide a rough sketch of how this bone could have evolved. No details necessary, just a general explanation of how God’s Bone could have COME FROM NOTHING and evolved into this EXTREMELY COMPLEX STRUCTURE. I know my money is safe because THERE IS NO WAY God’s Bone could be the end result of evolution because IT ONLY WORKS IF IT IS COMPLETE!!! Ha, take that, evolutionists! Now, please, please, please, come to my show to debate me, or I’ll run out of DVDs to sell.”

***

See, Bob, I can make shit up, too. Do you think I qualify as a creation “scientist”?

social capital is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.

Bob and his ilk are trying to make social currency by way of religion.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. I go away to spend an evening with Page and PZ, and a day with my wife, and Bob is fucking going of on magnets?

Bob. None of this is a problem for evolution. Does it provide an advantage for reproduction (such as navigation based on magnetic north)? Then it’s not a problem.

You’re quotemining, pure and simple “Can I believe this might happen?” Some folks can imagine it. Others, not. You have such a dearth of imagination, I figure you can’t imagine next Wednesday’s lunch at a diner, rather than off the belly of your favorite rent-a-boy, as is your normal Wednesday’s fare.

As we learn more, the borders of knowledge expand. What we claim as the limits today are merely the limits as we understand them today. Tomorrow, it might be different — but only based on new knowledge.

So fuck your quote mining. I could probably find quotes about the deterministic nature of the universe, if I wanted — pre-QM, of course. Now we know better.

And that’s the difference between us and you.

You can’t adjust your worldview based on knowledge. You’re frozen in the evil world of the Bible, no matter what evidence presents itself. You have to make the evidence match your preconceptions, no matter what. Otherwise, what’s the point of your belief?

That’s sadly pathetic.

Meanwhile, in the real wold, we get to adjust our understanding of reality based on current observation. The word’s not a pre-wound clock because QM has discovered the statistical nature of reality? That’s just jim-dandy here!

Oh! But I forgot. You can’t even figure out the basics of biology. Maybe I’m presenting a too-complex version of reality, in which nothing is certain, but our understanding makes everything more certain. as we discover new things.

Or is that not authoritative enough for you?

Okay. In that case, let me say:

I’ve been hesitant to say this, as Jesus told me to keep it to myself except for the most dire circumstance. But I think this is it.

Jesus told me to tell you: “Bob Enyart is a bloody git. He doesn’t undersand My plan. In fact, he’s a prideful asshole who believes he has the answers to everything, when in fact, he doesn’t have a fucking clue.”

Hey, Dude. That’s not me. That’s Jesus. He told me this directly. And he told me to tell you.

Thanks for posting my video, “Jack Horner Call”. It got more views in the last few days since you put it up here than it had prior to that since June of last year, although I find the insulting and vulgar comments left there rather odd from what is supposed to be an intellectual crowd of highly educated scientists.

As soon as creationists start treating the topic with intellectual honesty, perhaps then they have a right to complain about tone. But while creationists spew the same nonsense time and time again, what else can they expect? How much nonsense are people expected to put up with before ridicule and scorn are appropriate responses?

Hah, after browsing and following a couple of links, not only is this so called liquification in the morphogenesis of butterfly/moth inside the chrysalis deeply researched and mapped out, it is plainly shown that this *liquification* stage in embryonic development occurs in many classes of organisms in varying manners and complexities. Bob uses a single quote from a biologist using the word ‘miracle’ in the context of ‘amazing.’ Not only that, Bob, you didn’t even get the words of the quote right!
In any event, Bob uses this comment as verification of his credibility: “I cannot emphasize how much I love this stuff….it’s simplicity and truth at its finest — I thrive on it..I crave it: No science [background] required… no knowledge of any goofy theory, no [higher-education] schooling, no professors, no degrees, no books [needed, just eyes], no university study to rely on — just two guys talking about the miracle of creation.
The irony of incriminating adulation!
At the bottom of this page are links asking for money! Who’d have guessed? DVD’s and CD’s of Bob talking!! Only $14.99 – $469.99!!
PZ, Nigel, Bob MAKES MONEY SELLING RECORDINGS OF HIS DEBATES.

This is the famous formal debate between Dr. Bahnsen and atheist promoter Dr. Gordon Stein held at the university of California (Irvine) in 1985. Hear how hard it is to deny God’s existence and how intellectually rigorous the Christian position actually is.

Creationists are using several false concepts. Evolution vs. creationism is not a zero-sum game. If evolution loses then creationism doesn’t automatically win. Evolution explains how various species changed over time. Any theory which would replace evolution would have to explain these changes as well or better than evolution does.

Creationism isn’t a theory. It doesn’t explain anything. “GODDIDIT” or “and then a miracle happened” have no explanatory power. A supernatural being poofing everything into existence doesn’t tell us why and how certain structures are found in living organisms. Evolution either does or can explain these things. Also evolution is falsifiable. Ray Comfort’s misunderstanding* about the evolution of sex is falsifiable. GODDIDIT isn’t falsifiable, since any objection can be answered the same way: GODDIDIT. Therefore creationism is a failure as a replacement theory for evolution.

Creationists like Bob Enyart and Eugene Gateley spend all of their time trying to poke holes in evolution. They spend zero time propping up creationism. I suspect this is because Enyart and Gateley know that creationism is a failure as a scientific theory. But they won’t admit this. Intellectual honesty is not a trademark of creationists.

*Actually Comfort doesn’t misunderstand the evolution of sex. It’s been explained to him several times and he’s even acknowledged the explanations. His “misunderstanding” is really him lying about the evolution of sex. But creationists believe Lying for Jesus™ doesn’t really count as lying. That’s why they spend so much time lying about evolution.

Me @ #297:
“When it comes to defending any position that’s not held for relevant reasons, rationalisation is going to occur. I’m going to wager very few people are creationists, at least of the young earth variety, because they studied biology. Rather the belief is pleiotropic on a belief in the inerrant Bible. So while there’s a belief that the bible is the literal God’s Word, Creationism is going to be defended. So what else can we expect but people misrepresenting evolution, misrepresenting the state of biology, and misrepresenting science itself? They’re defending what they know to be the truest of truths.”

It’s just that Bob was rambling yesterday on his radio show about how Evolutionists are the true Flat-Earthers. He’ll probably counter your argument by copying and pasting some text from Creation magazine.

Anyway, even if it was not deliberate, I’ll watch and see if he bites.

It’s just that Bob was rambling yesterday on his radio show about how Evolutionists are the true Flat-Earthers.

Seriously? Wow!

tbh, I was going to make the flat-earth analogy, but John beat me to it. I really wonder what Bob’s angle is here; how those fused chromosome markers in our DNA got there, or those endogenous retroviruses sitting in the precise location in both ours and chimpanzee DNA got there.

It’s funny that Bob Enyart can make claims like that on a radio show, because the scientific literature keeps going on irrespective. Evolutionists as the flat-earthers? Is he high, or just dishonest?

“It’s just that Bob was rambling yesterday on his radio show about how Evolutionists are the true Flat-Earthers. ”

That’s too funny. We Evolutionists are the ones with all of the scientific literature and the consensus of experts supporting us. You know, like the people who side with the experts and believe the Earth is (close to) spherical.

You (creationists) don’t get to reject the consensus of experts in the field and then turn around and compare those sane enough to not follow suit to a different group that reject a different consensus expert opinion. It’s admitting that opposition to mainstream science is a mark of stupidity. That’s just shooting yourself in the damn foot. Which is pretty much the only thing that creationists do, now that I think about it. Must be how they get off, reducing everything below their ankles to a bloody nub, and laughing maniacally about how they have truly defeated their opponents. And don’t you dare try to cauterize their wounds! That’s just one of the devil’s tricks!

Up above, bobenyart wrote: “I would renounce Christianity if it could be shown that Christ did not rise from the dead. ”

Which still strikes be as being as stupid as saying: “I would renounce belief in Mother Goose if it could be shown that the cow did not jump over the moon.”

Still, it did make me wonder. He also wrote that millions of Christians accept evolution.

Does he think that accepting evolution and an old earth, as the findings of science, are compatible with Christianity? If so, what is his problem with accepting them?

Is there anything that would convince him to renounce his anti-evolution beliefs? Is there anything that would convince him to renounce his young-earth beliefs?

Does he even have young-earth beliefs? If he does not, his support of dishonest YEC claims about carbon-14 is disingenuous, and intellectually dishonest.

On the other hand, if he is a hard-core YEC, then tying his faith in a young earth to dishonest YEC claims about carbon-14 is deeply ignorant and stupid, given the enormous number of dating systems that support an earth that is certainly orders of magnitude older than 6000 years.

So I’m just wondering if he’s merely very stupid, or utterly dishonest.

We have it on YesYouNeedJesus’s authority that Personally I think that Walt Brown is the greatest scientist of our day, but after Walt Brown, Bob is one of the most brilliant scientific minds I’ve ever listened to.

It’s admitting that opposition to mainstream science is a mark of stupidity. That’s just shooting yourself in the damn foot. Which is pretty much the only thing that creationists do, now that I think about it.

…and have been doing.

for decades.

and yet, they still manage to con new generations with this crap.

and they will continue to do so until people get it into their fucking heads that religion itself is just a tool, it never was real. It always was nothing more than a tool of con men, to gain social standing and power.

Bob is a fucking con man, just like Ken Ham, just like Eric Hovind, just like Ray Comfort

Worse than them, actually. They’re just IDiots, but Bob Enyart – the proven liar and convicted child abuser – is also a sicko Christian Sharia supporter. He thinks all USA laws are supposed to derive from the old testament, and if he and his filthy fellow travelers had their way, we would be forced back to before the Dark Ages, back to stoning adulterers and rebellious children to death … as far as I know, as crooked as Ham, Hovind and Comfort are, none of them espouse the Christian Sharia which Bob Enyart does.
Given Bob Enyart’s Christian terrorism, I’m a little surprised that he has not (yet) abused one of his children to death. He certainly thinks it would be justified to do so by his so-called god’s word.

If there’s one thing that pseudoscientists have learnt, it’s the value of sounding sciency. Ben Goldacre gave a good account of this problem in Bad Science; even people who have some qualifications in a field will prefer sciency-sounding wrong answers over plain English correct answers. The attacks on science are getting vastly more organised, vastly more technical, but no less absurd.

“Irreducible complexity” is a great term – too bad it was a prediction of evolution for about 80 years before Behe introduced the concept to a delighted crowd of creationists. But irreducible complexity has a much more sciency ring to it than just stating how complex things are. Or there’s specified complexity, if one prefers their expression of complexity to be stated in the paradigm of information theory.

Yet the logic of the design argument is just as wanting as it was 250 years ago, and the empirical foundation of evolution has been validated by the last 150 years of inquiry – including by disciplines that couldn’t even be dreamed of by Darwin and Wallace. Dressing creationism up in sciency terms at least gives the pretence of some validity, but it’s still the same nonsense that’s long since been shown conceptually and empirically wrong.

Sometimes I wonder if the Genesis myth were different if we’d have to put up with such nonsense. Bruce Hood in Supersense argued that children see the world in strong teleological terms, so creationism he argues is a natural outgrowth of such brain processes – it’s just that most of us grow out of it. But much of the creationist movement seems a direct outgrowth of evangelical Christianity; that creationism is part of being a True Christian™ in much the same way as being anti-homosexual is. How much are we going through the same nonsense arguments because the real battle, as Philip Johnson recognised, is between the existence and non-existence of God? I remember a discussion between Roger Allen and Massimo Pigliucci where Massimo had to push Robert to get him to admit that he was basing his beliefs off the bible (he couldn’t just say it up front). But that’s the whole problem. This is not science, and all this discussion is merely a foil creationists use to try to preserve their nonsense beliefs that have long since been conceptually and empirically destroyed.

You can of course download shit like this for free. Example: Bob interviews Reggie Finley Qoth Bob: “[Wife-beater Christians] … are being fed pagan Greek philosopher [therefore end up in jail]” Seriously arse-about-face once you know that he is a child abuser.

You ask about whether Will Duffy treats Jews and Hindus like “zombies he can freely lie and cheat because they have no sense of right and wrong?”

I’ve known Will for many years. I’ve never seen him throw venom at anyone, but I’ve seen you do so, and I’ve only been aware of you for a few days. Like me I’m sure, Will would have a special love and concern for the folks you’ve mentioned, “Jews and Hindus,” being far more kind and thoughtful toward them as a matter of habit than you show yourself to be toward Christians.

He did in this very thread. He called the capacity for us to function as persons into question. If I were to go to you and treat you as furniture instead of an animate object it would be as insulting. I responded in kind.

My point was that non-christians do not get their morality from the Bible. Duffy is big on that we clearly can’t get morality from anywhere, but you have illustrated my point. You’re fine taking that jab at Atheists who are fair targets, but to point out that the criticism applies to targets society would frown on you for attacking and you crumble.

I hold Christians to be far better than their own religion does, because I don’t believe they are ‘broken’.

And frankly, Bob, that’s why I think you seem so damn scared of nonbelif (not nonbelievers, just no belief). You hate the idea that when you say ooooh beat a child (just to pull a random an example out of a hat) that you might be held responsible. I think you hate the idea of someone thinking “You should know better” and “Following Orders is not an excuse” rather than “Well you’re forgiven”

So yes, Bob, tremble before the unbelief and lash out; because we hold you to a higher expectation than you or your god does.

the real battle, as Philip Johnson recognised, is between the existence and non-existence of God?

no, I disagree. I think you’ve eaten the red herring there.

the battle over the existence of God was lost long, long ago, and most recognized this long before the 20th century, though I think it took Nietzsche to really put it poetically.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

the existence of the abrahamic god, whatever could be gleaned of such a thing from the published texts, is a long foregone conclusion.

the idea that this is an argument about existence is nothing more than a red herring, designed to keep the ignorant fearful, and the non-ignorant tilting at windmills.

The debate is between believers and non-believers, that believers are fighting over the existence of God through battles like evolution. This is different from the intellectual question of the existence of God, as you plainly stated: “the battle over the existence of God was lost long, long ago”.

I was talking about the underlying motivations of believers and what the creationist battle meant in respect to those fighting it; not in any sense that the battle is the way to fight the question or that the question hasn’t been settled already. I think AC Grayling sums it up perfectly when he says “I do not believe that there are any such things as gods and goddesses, for exactly the same reasons as I do not believe there are fairies, goblins or sprites, and these reasons should be obvious to anyone over the age of ten.”

but i would add that I sincerely doubt that this is where Bob is coming from, or that he even really cares about the distinction.

I don’t think many people would care about the distinction – that of course what they believe is true really is Truth. Distinctions like that only really matter in the face of scepticism, and even then there’s always some “out” to avoid the issue.

Three more days, and Bob’s still avoiding this issue, brought up by amphiox in post #49, almost a week ago:

amphiox wrote:

To further belabor the point: C14 dating is a methodology. An experimental procedure, so named because the first and most widespread use is for dating relatively recent objects in the age range of thousands to tens of thousands of years.

…

Of course, even if you take that [carbon dating] result at face value, that’s still almost five times older than the bible says the entire universe is, and thus utterly falsifies pretty much ALL versions of young-earth creationism.

Sooo, for those of you who may (or may not) have been waiting, my little blog post is finished: http://www.thedrantherlair.com/2011/10/walls-again-collapse/
Feel free to poke around the rest of the blog too … and see how radically my beliefs have changed in the past couple years (I’m pretty sure there’s still an old post on there defending YEC…).

On another note:

raven said:

Looks like one of Bob Enyart’s co-religionists got caught again. Enyart is either a wimp or got caught early. He is merely a convicted child abuser whereas these xians are being charged with homicide.
OT The fundie xians have sacrificied another child to their Clown Sky Monster god.
This girl was starved, beaten, and tortured to death.
[snip]
A witness told investigators that the Williams got their ideas for the disciplinary measures from a book, “How to Train Up Your Child,” which recommends switchings with a plumbing tool, cold water baths, withholding food and putting children out in cold weather as forms of punishment.My note This is Michael Pearl’s book, a fundie xian pastor. It’s killed several kids already.

Yeah … this is just some of the cultic/fundie stuff I’ve been facing down over this last year … given that my wife comes from a family where Pearl methods, “Christian Patriarchy”, and other destructive theologies reign.

“Their god bears no relation to scientific truth and yet they feel compelled to prove things by means of science.”

That’s the cargo cult effect. Their god never gave anyone a refrigerator, either. Or penicillin, or liposuction, or a light bulb, or scotch tape, or velcro, or personal computers.

They feel short in the shaft, as a matter of speaking. If science can gift us with all these things that work, and they can feel that god is sciencey, then their everyday dose of goddish thought will carry with it the stamp of scienciness, which will make them feel better.

But as it stands, they got nothing, and they feel the pain of it. Deep down, they know it’s bullshit, and they’re desperate to find some way to wash the fecal matter from their “theory”.

I finally finished reading every single comment last night. Can you guys at least appreciate that?

Tim Delaney, I found your show. It all took place the night of November 6th, 1997. I will work on a transcript and post it here for everyone to try to rip apart. I am wondering if you’d be willing to admit that you believed and accepted evolution on blind faith back when you called.

There have been quite a lot of arguments and questions by everyone that have gone unanswered. I wish I could answer them, by I do not know much about science. That is not the direction I have chosen in my life. (Wish I had more time to do so!) I do have a couple comments though.

1. I think that this thread is evidence for God. Everyone seems to be in complete unison that lying and abusing your child is ABSOLUTELY wrong. You all probably deny moral absolutes, but your words and actions show otherwise. And to think that you all were raised in different homes, by different sets of parents, and in different communities and societies, yet all managed to come to the EXACT same conclusion on right and wrong. Now that’s some powerful evidence!

2. The visceral hatred and ugliness and crudeness and rudeness exhibited by just about everyone here is evidence to me that you truly do not believe inside that you hold the truth and that you truly do not believe inside you are arguing with creationists that have the intelligence of an 8th grader. Think of all the subjects one could just destroy an 8th grader on. But does that really feel good? No, because it’s someone that doesn’t know much. When arguing with an 8th grader on economics, as an example, would you EVER be tempted to spew all the ugliness on him that has been spewed here? Of course not, because it’s someone that doesn’t know much. The hatred displayed here defies all logic if it really is David vs Goliath as you all claim. There’s something much deeper at work and I think I know what that is.

3. Many people want to know how creationists reconcile 14C dates that are larger than 6,000 years. Great question. I think it’s possible to undo aspects of the theory of evolution using 14C and that is one issue. (They have found 14C in diamonds, that is not contamination.) Then a separate issue comes into play, of how a creationist reconciles that with his view. I think the answer is that Carbon dating is not an exact science. There are so many unknown variables from the past, that we can NEVER know which could and most likely did, affect the Carbon we have today. If 14C is so reliable, I would love to see living things carbon dated as a scientific test. (I may be getting in over my head here since I’m not a scientist, but here goes anyway!) When we know the exact age of something living, say an animal, plant or human, I would love to see the age that a carbon test produces for that living thing.

The reason Jack Horner would not carbon date dinosaur soft-tissue is not because you can’t. (You actually CAN do a scientific test Dr. Horner.) It’s because he intuitively knew that there would 14C in it and that the evidence would go against his scientific beliefs. He assumes that dinosaurs are a million years old, and so it doesn’t make sense to carbon date something you assume to be that old. But therein lies the problem, it’s an assumption that dinosaurs are a million years old. I know everyone will say that it is a proven fact, but how many times have evolutionary scientists said something was a proven fact and were wrong? Spontaneous generation anyone? Everyone here willingly admits that science changes and progresses through science.

All the evolutionists in the world had a knee-jerk reaction that Mary Schweitzer’s soft-tissue T-rex absolutely positively could not be soft-tissue. Why would a true scientist ever think that? A true scientist would want to see the scientific tests done and want to know if it truly is soft-tissue or maybe something else, like biofilm. Mary Schweitzer went under attack by evolutionists nationwide and she was trying to do science on a startling find. Evolutionists could really do themselves a favor and at least act like scientists. This is a perfect example of why I believe there is something else at the root of this, and it’s beyond science. Mary Schweitzer asked a scientist what evidence he would need to see to believe that this was original biological material and he said something like, “No evidence would ever convince me.” Wow…some “scientist” huh?

You and your buddy keep saying this, without providing a citation to any peer reviewed publication, and without acknowledging that it’s already been answered: Nitrogen occurs naturally in diamonds. It isn’t possible to assert that 14C isn’t ‘contamination’, Nitrogen + radioactivity leads to 14C. That’s how it happens in the atmosphere, that’s one of the ways it happens in diamonds.

2. The visceral hatred and ugliness and crudeness and rudeness exhibited by just about everyone here is evidence to me that you truly do not believe inside that you hold the truth and that you truly do not believe inside you are arguing with creationists that have the intelligence of an 8th grader

This just doesn’t even make sense. It’s a complete non-sequitur. So we dislike people who lie, who are willfully ignorant, who ignore what we write, who keep repeating the same falsehoods over and over, even when presented with facts. Are those the traits of a likable person?

Of course we have the truth. The truth is all around us. It’s a little thing we like to call reality. And the reality is, our model of reality is far closer to actual reality than yours.

The other thing we dislike is the intent of your lies. You intend to deceive others, not just yourself.

Besides, self-righteous clown, it’s fun to watch you wriggle like a fish on a hook. When you have to resort to posts declaring how angry we are, it indicates you have no other real argument.

Waffler (I stole this off the internet because I’m not a science guy),

One can hypothesize that neutrons were once much more plentiful than they are now, and that is why there is so much carbon-14 in our experimental samples. But the number of neutrons required must be over a million times more than those found today, for at least 6,000 years; and every 5,730 years that we put the neutron shower back doubles the number of neutrons required. Every time we halve the duration of the neutron shower we roughly double its required intensity. Eventually the problem becomes insurmountable. In addition, since nitrogen-14 captures neutrons 110,000 times more easily than does carbon-13, a sample with 0.000 0091% nitrogen should have twice the carbon-14 content of a sample without any nitrogen. If neutron capture is a significant source of carbon-14 in a given sample, radiocarbon dates should vary wildly with the nitrogen content of the sample. I know of no such data. Perhaps this effect should be looked for by anyone seriously proposing that significant quantities of carbon-14 were produced by nuclear synthesis in situ.

What a fuckwitted delusional fool. There was no evidence for your imaginary deity presented by either you or your delusional buddy enyart, ergo, your deity doesn’t exist. An eternally burning bush is required, not circular reasoning, which are to too stupid to see.

The visceral hatred and ugliness and crudeness and rudeness exhibited by just about everyone here is evidence to me that you truly do not believe inside that you hold the truth and that you truly do not believe inside you are arguing with creationists that have the intelligence of an 8th grader.

The only hatred shown is for lying liars, and the lies that they spread. Like imaginary deities. No evidence. If you quit thinking like an 8th grader, you won’t be treated like an 8th grader. There is this thing called the peer reviewed scientific literature, and it is found in the science libraries of institutions of higher learning world wide. And you and Enyart are totally ignorant of the contents therein. Religion cannot refute science, which is only done by more science. The amount of science you offered is zip, zero, nil, nada. Nothing but pretending your book of mythology is inerrant. An assertion which you, like with your diety, don’t even try to back up with evidence. It is all presupposition and pretending. You hate reality.

I think it’s possible to undo aspects of the theory of evolution using 14C and that is one issue. (They have found 14C in diamonds, that is not contamination.)

You don’t think. If you did, you would realize that the carbon 14 business is a red herrring. Science has it totally and utterly explained, and you and the other creationsist simply offer opinion, not scientific fact. You were totally and utterly refuted before you demonstrated your ignorance and willful stupidity by pretending you have factoids that mean something. Whether you like it or not, neutron capture by carbon 13 is continuously happening. There is an very easy way to prove it, which is to stick a piece of coal or a diamond in a nuclear reactor, and do carbon 14 dating before and after. Come on, are you afraid to actually run a experiment that will prove you wrong? Bawk, bawk, bawk. Chicken…

All the evolutionists in the world had a knee-jerk reaction that Mary Schweitzer’s soft-tissue T-rex absolutely positively could not be soft-tissue. Why would a true scientist ever think that?

We real scientist, not fuckwitted idjits like you, want conclusive, not suggestive, evidence. You can’t even supply suggestive evidence for your imaginary deity. What a loser.

All the evolutionists in the world had a knee-jerk reaction that Mary Schweitzer’s soft-tissue T-rex absolutely positively could not be soft-tissue. Why would a true scientist ever think that? A true scientist would want to see the scientific tests done and want to know if it truly is soft-tissue or maybe something else, like biofilm.

This is an example of how you ignore what is actually written here, Duffy. This has already been addressed, with links to the papers giving the results from the research into this very tissue issue.

Did you read of of the papers linked from here? Real scientists doing real science have already answered these questions. And it came out in favor of a very ancient earth.

Go read some of those papers. Stop taking the word of a person who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about (that’d be Bob Enyart). Read what actual scientists practicing actual science have to say on the issue.

As an aside: Bob Enyart isn’t a “scientific mind,” let alone a great one. He’s a presuppositionalist who strives hard to reconcile what is being found in the world around you (evidence of a very ancient earth, for one) with his preconception that the world is only a few thousand years old.

In addition, since nitrogen-14 captures neutrons 110,000 times more easily than does carbon-13,

Citation needed fuckwit. You are nothing but a liar and bullshitter, and poser, so we can’t take your word for anything other than lies until proven otherwise. You don’t tell the truth. Your deity doesn’t exist is the truth. My CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics says the difference is 1:100, not 110,000. You lie.

Waffler (I stole this off the internet because I’m not a science guy),

Of course you did, and of course you’re not. If you were, you’d realize it was completely non-responsive to the point raised. But since you admit you aren’t a science guy, and thus unable to judge who is one, maybe the honorable thing to do would be to stop promoting claims you can’t reasonably verify?

One can hypothesize that neutrons were once much more plentiful than they are now, and that is why there is so much carbon-14 in our experimental samples.

There are two things wrong here: first, the amount of carbon-14 found in diamonds is hardly statistically greater than the margin of error. There isn’t “so much” carbon-14 in the samples — there’s hardly any.

Second, you don’t need a universal increase in neutrons. All you’d need would be a local source of energetic neutrons. Now, I now you rely on Bob Enyart for all your knowledge about this stuff, but there is a fairly common source of energetic neutrons often found with diamonds: radioactive materials. This doesn’t have to be plutonium or yellowcake or anything quite as radioactive.

Finally, as diamonds are hard to combust, the team that “discovered” carbon-14 in the diamonds had to modify the typical measurement process. It appears the RATE team had methodological problems, and other researchers trying to duplicate the findings came up with results closer to the expected measurements.

So again, you are jumping to conclusions on skimpy or faulty evidence, attempting to justify your beliefs with bad or misinterpreted results.

And I think that this thread is strong evidence against your God. Because the amount of stupidity displayed here could not possibly be intelligently designed.

The hatred displayed here defies all logic if it really is David vs Goliath as you all claim. There’s something much deeper at work and I think I know what that is.

Yes I do. It’s my contempt for people who don’t know what the hell they are talking about but are thinking of themselves as experts. People who are dishonest and distort scientific research.

In other words, people like Bob and you.

I don’t really want to comment on the rest because pretty much everything has already been addressed and since you obviously lack the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that I won’t be wasting my time with that.

But then you think that organisms rife with evidence for evolution were created. What you think is, apparently, irrelevant to the truth.

The visceral hatred and ugliness and crudeness and rudeness exhibited by just about everyone here is evidence to me that you truly do not believe inside that you hold the truth and that you truly do not believe inside you are arguing with creationists that have the intelligence of an 8th grader.

We’re not claiming that you clowns are innately stupid, just that your visceral hatred of the truth and of us makes you sound like uneducated dullards. Nothing’s changed with the latest post, with its pathetic attempts at pop psychology.

Think of all the subjects one could just destroy an 8th grader on. But does that really feel good?

No, shithead, it feels good to call you the lying asshole that you are, in part to protect 8th graders from your egregious dishonesty.

No, because it’s someone that doesn’t know much. When arguing with an 8th grader on economics, as an example, would you EVER be tempted to spew all the ugliness on him that has been spewed here?

You know why? Yes, even you probably understand the difference between an innocent person who isn’t harming anybody, and a lying vile charlatan like yourself who doesn’t even know how to be intellectually honest. You’re old enough to know better, you’re just a bullshitter who doesn’t care who you hurt.

The hatred displayed here defies all logic if it really is David vs Goliath as you all claim.

Many people hate Madoff. Gee, I wonder why that really is? It couldn’t be that he lied, cajoled them out of money, and ruined lives. Just like you and Bob.

There’s something much deeper at work and I think I know what that is.

Yes, stupidity, lying, and deceiving people to give you and your buddy money couldn’t be it, could it be? No one gets mad at the cons of conmen like you, it’s got to be something else.

I finally finished reading every single comment last night. Can you guys at least appreciate that?

I can appreciate that you think you made an effort, but I think it was kind of wasted. You obviously didn’t understand much of what you read.

I think that this thread is evidence for God.

That’s a terribly stupid thing to say.

Everyone seems to be in complete unison that lying and abusing your child is ABSOLUTELY wrong.

Well, it’s true that many of us don’t like the idea of being lied to, or of committing child abuse.

And to think that you all were raised in different homes, by different sets of parents, and in different communities and societies, yet all managed to come to the EXACT same conclusion on right and wrong.

The fact that Creationists think that lying to other people, and committing child abuse is fine and good, shows that Creationists have no absolute morality, and do not come to the exact same conclusions on right and wrong.

Now that’s some powerful evidence!

Why would it be evidence of God?

The visceral hatred and ugliness and crudeness and rudeness exhibited by just about everyone here is evidence to me that you truly do not believe inside that you hold the truth and that you truly do not believe inside you are arguing with creationists that have the intelligence of an 8th grader.

If that’s true, then the visceral hatred and ugliness and crudeness and rudeness of Christians who assert that non-Christians will be tortured forever in hell is evidence that they do not believe inside that they hold the truth, and they truly do not believe inside that they are arguing with the damned.

See? Your stupid logic “works” — or rather, fails to work — against you as well.

I think it’s possible to undo aspects of the theory of evolution using 14C and that is one issue.

Of course it isn’t possible to undo anything at all about the theory of evolution using radiocarbon. You simply fail to understand anything about how radiocarbon dating works.

I think the answer is that Carbon dating is not an exact science.

No-one ever claimed that it was. But it can give approximately correct results for organic material less old than ten half-lives of carbon-14.

If 14C is so reliable, I would love to see living things carbon dated as a scientific test.

You betray your fundamental ignorance of the dating system, here.

You can no more date living things using radiocarbon than you can tell time with an hourglass that continually has sand being added to the top half of the glass.

The reason Jack Horner would not carbon date dinosaur soft-tissue is not because you can’t. […] It’s because he intuitively knew that there would 14C in it and that the evidence would go against his scientific beliefs.

It’s because he knows that the amount of carbon-14 in it is utterly irrelevant to its age.

The bone was dated to far more than ten half-lives of carbon-14, using other dating methods.

He assumes that dinosaurs are a million years old

No. He concludes that (non-avian) dinosaurs all died out 65 million years ago, because that’s what the evidence of the dating methods shows.

and so it doesn’t make sense to carbon date something you assume to be that old.

Rather, it doesn’t make sense to carbon date something you have properly concluded to be that old.

it’s an assumption that dinosaurs are a million years old.

It’s a scientific conclusion that (non-avian) dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.

I know everyone will say that it is a proven fact

It follows from the same scientific methods that all other science is derived from.

Spontaneous generation anyone?

Spontaneous generation — complex life arising from relatively inert materials in relatively brief amounts of time — was held to be true by Christian scientists — the usual list of early natural philosophers who were Christians, and who also believed in alchemy and astrology.

Abiogenesis — complex life arising over a very long period of time from extremely complex chemical reactions — is still a valid scientific hypothesis

Is Creationism capable of accepting science, or is it just science denialism?

All the evolutionists in the world had a knee-jerk reaction that Mary Schweitzer’s soft-tissue T-rex absolutely positively could not be soft-tissue.

That’s a ludicrous lie, since Mary Schweitzer is herself an evolutionist.

Mary Schweitzer went under attack by evolutionists nationwide and she was trying to do science on a startling find.

She did not go “under attack”. Her conclusions and methods were questioned.

Evolutionists could really do themselves a favor and at least act like scientists.

They did. Science works by questioning conclusions and methods.

Mary Schweitzer asked a scientist what evidence he would need to see to believe that this was original biological material and he said something like, “No evidence would ever convince me.”

Given your pathetic ignorance of science, and of the scientific method, and of everything surround Mary Schweitzer’s finds, and your pathetic attempt to imply that Mary Schweitzer is not herself an evolutionist, I strongly suspect that your claim above is utterly false.

Like all creationists, you neither know nor care about what is true; only about what supports your dogma.

I finally finished reading every single comment last night. Can you guys at least appreciate that?

You are doing this for jeebus. Go ask it for praise. (Don’t be surprised if most commenters here have read every post too. You have to read a lot to get ahead in reality. Just one book will never cut it.)

[Tim Delaney] I am wondering if you’d be willing to admit that you believed and accepted evolution on blind faith back when you called.

Hey, chill out. There is nothing wrong with just saying “I was wrong.” Why don’t you try it some time? It will be liberating. Sure as hell beats knocking down your conscience and common sense to keep up your brand loyalty to Yahwe ™.

I wish I could answer them, by I do not know much about science. That is not the direction I have chosen in my life.

We cannot expect all people to be scientists. You can at least be honest and open – it really takes no more effort than lying. Your jeebus stories reject things that you are ignorant about. Would it not be to Teh Lawd’s greater glory to actually understand what it is you are arguing against? Your view of science is very low. I guess your Lawd can’t jump very high.

Wish I had more time to do so!

You have years. We are not going anywhere. If you can make time for ignorance, why can’t you find some time to learn about reality?

Everyone seems to be in complete unison that lying and abusing your child is ABSOLUTELY wrong. …yet all managed to come to the EXACT same conclusion on right and wrong. Now that’s some powerful evidence!

Well, yes, evidence for evolution. We are highly evolved social animals. Could you suggest any other way for such creatures as us to behave? Also, everyone I know on this thread would extend the courtesy to ANY child. (It is your god that faps to killing non-jew kiddies.)

There’s something much deeper at work and I think I know what that is.

You could also be wrong. You are not the first liar-for-jeebus to troll this site. If you know what is at work please spit it out already.

I may be getting in over my head here since I’m not a scientist, but here goes anyway!

[Jack Horner] It’s because he intuitively knew that there would 14C in it and that the evidence would go against his scientific beliefs.

That sounds rather much like libel to me. Are you even qualified to make a statement like that? Do you have evidence? (There is no such thing as “scientific belief” the words you seek are “scientific fraud”, which is held in extreme contempt by rational people of every stripe.) PS: Science can be wrong, it is in the very nature of falsifiable claims that they are falsifiable. Has your holey babble ever been wrong? (Oh do please answer my Joshua question… pretty please.)

If you didn’t select a username of a king who is known for cruelty to the Jews, I would think you had a well-honed sense of humor:
AE: Bob Enyart has a three-chambered heart. Bob Enyart went to highschool with the famous blog commenter…
You know of course that he was called Antiochus Epimanes, which play on words meant: lunatic.

I didn’t select this nym, but was given the name by my parents, Testicles and Papilloma Epiphanes of Smyrna. It isn’t my fault that they thought it would be funny to name me after the second cruelest tyrant of the Old Testament. In fact, the kids at school back in the old country used to tease me by calling me “Antiochus Epimanes”, a practice that only ended when the other students discovered that one of my nipples had been bitten off by a goat, at which point they simply began to call me “θηλή”. Given that I had been singing your praises earlier in the thread, I can’t imagine why you would want to bring back such painful memories.

Perhaps I’ll spend some time this afternoon listening to old tapes I bought of some of your better spoken word performances. As touching as Bob Enyart: Live at Carnegie Hall was, I think I prefer the album you made with Tom Poston, Barnyard Sounds. It always makes me laugh. Maybe I’ll be able to recall what I once liked about you.

1. I think that this thread is evidence for God. Everyone seems to be in complete unison that lying and abusing your child is ABSOLUTELY wrong. You all probably deny moral absolutes, but your words and actions show otherwise. And to think that you all were raised in different homes, by different sets of parents, and in different communities and societies, yet all managed to come to the EXACT same conclusion on right and wrong. Now that’s some powerful evidence!

Yes. Powerful evidence that God does not exist.

Consider: of all those who believe in God, few can agree on anything. Between the trivial difference between dunking and sprinkling, there’s also the difference between various protestent sects. Some think being gay is just dandy. Others do not. Up the ladder if moral differences is the Catholics vs. the Protestants. Up even farther are the vast differences between the moralities of Christian Law, Halakha, and Sharia Law. There are some major differences there.

Meanwhile, those of us who assume morality comes not from diktat but from the needs of society, and the roles of individuals within society, agree on many (if not most) of those morals.

This is the most damning evidence you can have that morality is a natural product of a social animal, rather than a code handed down by a lawgiver, even more than that thought experiment of a single person on a lifeless planet. (Name one moral or immoral act that can be undertaken by a lone person on a lifeless planet.)

1. I think that this thread is evidence for God. Everyone seems to be in complete unison that lying and abusing your child is ABSOLUTELY wrong. You all probably deny moral absolutes, but your words and actions show otherwise. And to think that you all were raised in different homes, by different sets of parents, and in different communities and societies, yet all managed to come to the EXACT same conclusion on right and wrong. Now that’s some powerful evidence!

The standard of proof you are asking for is very poor. The fact is that most of the people here commenting against child abuse shows empathy. We all have been children and some of us have been abused. If it was wrong for one’s self to be treated in that manner, by extension, it is wrong for everyone else to be treated the same way.

Except that there are disagreements about what constitutes child abuse. There goes the absolute moral certainty that you claim is here.

Oh. And oh yes! There is your moral friend who was charged with child abuse.

The visceral hatred and ugliness and crudeness and rudeness exhibited by just about everyone here is evidence to me that you truly do not believe inside that you hold the truth and that you truly do not believe inside you are arguing with creationists that have the intelligence of an 8th grader. Think of all the subjects one could just destroy an 8th grader on. But does that really feel good? No, because it’s someone that doesn’t know much. When arguing with an 8th grader on economics, as an example, would you EVER be tempted to spew all the ugliness on him that has been spewed here? Of course not, because it’s someone that doesn’t know much. The hatred displayed here defies all logic if it really is David vs Goliath as you all claim. There’s something much deeper at work and I think I know what that is.

You mistake sarcasm and frustration with hatred. Many people here have heard the same unsubstantiated claims from the likes of you for years if not decades. Making fun if it is but one coping mechanism for dealing with what must be done.

Two things about using a hypothetical eighth grader. First, you are not a child. Second, there are plenty of eight graders who have not been tainted by the likes of you who knows and understands the issues of evolution better then you ever will.

Many people want to know how creationists reconcile 14C dates that are larger than 6,000 years. Great question. I think it’s possible to undo aspects of the theory of evolution using 14C and that is one issue. (They have found 14C in diamonds, that is not contamination.) Then a separate issue comes into play, of how a creationist reconciles that with his view. I think the answer is that Carbon dating is not an exact science. There are so many unknown variables from the past, that we can NEVER know which could and most likely did, affect the Carbon we have today. If 14C is so reliable, I would love to see living things carbon dated as a scientific test. (I may be getting in over my head here since I’m not a scientist, but here goes anyway!) When we know the exact age of something living, say an animal, plant or human, I would love to see the age that a carbon test produces for that living thing.

I barely know anything about this subject but even I know that carbon dating is not the only method. There are radio active isotopes of other elements that also break down in predictable cycles. These are all used to place a fossil in an approximate era.

YYNJ, you are the knee jerk reactionary. And you put up a piss poor defense of your position. Also, you get nothing for reading all of the comments of one thread. So have most of the other people who have been commenting. You are not a special snowflake.

Tim Delaney, I found your show. It all took place the night of November 6th, 1997. I will work on a transcript and post it here for everyone to try to rip apart.

OK, you got the date right. And except for the Enyart rant about Galileo, a video of the exchange between me and Enyart has been posted on this thread. (See post 309)

Recall that I have admitted that I was a neophyte to the debate back in 1997. In point of fact, I was not even familiar with the name Earnst Haeckel back then. Enyart ambushed me, and in my naivete I took the bait. And yet, his rant was entirely without scientific merit. When asked about evidence for evolution, I mentioned “gill slits”, and he took over from there. (Watch the video). Of course, the features in the human embryo are not homologous with gill slits; I understand that now. Yet, the pharyngeal (ironic, that) arches in human embryos are homologous with the same features in fish embryos, so my mention of gill slits, though off the mark in terms of terminology, was actually evidence for evolution. Today, I am familiar with much more powerful evidence than pharyngeal arches. The evidence is overwhelming, and (at least to rational beings) indisputable.

I am wondering if you’d be willing to admit that you believed and accepted evolution on blind faith back when you called.

I take it from your question that you consider “blind faith” as a pejorative. I agree with you on that point. Blind faith is stupid and unwarranted. However, as you can see from my newspaper rebuttal to one Jerry Janowski, I rely upon evidence rather than blind faith. In fact, I refer to “evidence” in that rebuttal many times. (I can post that article if you have doubts.) As naive as I was at that time, I knew that evidence was more convincing than faith. Can you say the same?

Now let’s get down to brass tacks. Are you willing to engage in a written debate on the question: “Is young earth creationism true?”, or are you going to back down? Yes or no?

Many people want to know how creationists reconcile 14C dates that are larger than 6,000 years. Great question. I think it’s possible to undo aspects of the theory of evolution using 14C and that is one issue.

Or in other words, you just want to pound on evolution, you dishonest twit.

An honest person takes the evidence and tries to make sense of it. You cherry pick, ignoring everything that goes against your prejudices, and try to claim that this one questionable “result” destroys the coherence of all of the rest of the evidence. Since you don’t care about truth, what else could we expect?

(They have found 14C in diamonds, that is not contamination.) Then a separate issue comes into play, of how a creationist reconciles that with his view.

That is not a separate issue to an honest person, which a creationist generally is not. Making sense of the evidence is what matters to the intellectually honest, not how much you can damage all of the evidence that an ignoramus like yourself doesn’t even understand. Idiot.

I think the answer is that Carbon dating is not an exact science.

Gee, you think?

How does that help the creationist, and not the honest persons who understand just how shaky your C-14 “evidence” really is? Only via your thoroughgoing dishonesty can it help the creationist while you totally reject our cautionary statement like the jerkwad you are.

There are so many unknown variables from the past, that we can NEVER know which could and most likely did, affect the Carbon we have today.

So, you don’t trust it except for the one purpose a dishonest cretin like yourself wishes for it, to “destroy evolution.” Expediency is thy name.

If 14C is so reliable, I would love to see living things carbon dated as a scientific test.

See, this is just it, you’re such an ignorant bullshitter that you don’t even know that such tests have been done. What do you think, that scientists are as devious and dishonest as yourself? Wrong, and yet another lie by implication.

(I may be getting in over my head here since I’m not a scientist, but here goes anyway!) When we know the exact age of something living, say an animal, plant or human, I would love to see the age that a carbon test produces for that living thing.

You may be an egregiously dishonest jerk. OK, no “may” about it. The fact, dullard, is that you don’t “date” present-day organic remains at all like you do ancient remains, because nuclear bomb testing has greatly elevated C-14 in our atmosphere, although the input of ancient carbon has been decreasing that level ever since the tests were ended. Indeed, there is a kind of dating done today using these known facts.

So of course present-day life has been tested, and Will doesn’t know a damned thing about it, nor what is known to have changed C-14 levels recently.

Gee, what a shock, the greatest living scientists today, Bob Enyart and Walt Brown sure haven’t taught this bozo much.

When we know the exact age of something living, say an animal, plant or human, I would love to see the age that a carbon test produces for that living thing.

So long as an organism remains alive, it continually exchanges carbon with its surroundings, and the amount of C14 in it will be in steady state with the amount of C14 in the atmosphere, where C14 is continually being produced due to cosmic ray bombardment of nitrogen (among other sources).

This means that C14 testing on anything that is still alive will always turn back a result of 0, give or take error margin. The C14 clock is essentially like a stopwatch that is continuously being zeroed while the organism is alive.

Only after an organism has died, and it stops taking in new C14 from the surroundings, does the ratio of remaining C14 become meaningful for dating purposes. Metaphorically, the clock stops being zeroed at death and starts to tick.

For anyone to propose C14 dating a living organism simply betrays an abject ignorance of how and why C14 dating actually works.

Then you cannot use it to argue against evolutionary dates, now, can you?

I think it’s possible to undo aspects of the theory of evolution using 14C

If it is not reliable, then you can’t use it for anything. And it is pure dishonesty to argue that it can say anything at all about evolution.

Let’s throw out all the C14 dating data as unreliable then. What have we left then? ALL the evolutionary dates that are older than 60 000 years are unaffected, depending as they do on radioactive clocks using elements that don’t have C14’s problem of continual environmental regeneration. Evolutionary dates from 0 to 10 000 years has dendrochronology to back it up. Evolutionary dates from 10 000 to 60 000 years have ice core data to back it up.

Evolutionary theory doesn’t rely on C14 dating much at all, you know. The 60 000 year span of C14 dating basically counts as a single blip on evolutionary timescales. Archeology gets messed up a little bit (they do after historical records for correlation of course), but evolutionary science hardly depends on C14 dating much at all, really.

ALL disagreement, no matter how mild, counts as hatred to these people. The dishonest ones among them use “hatred” as a rhetorical bludgeon to keep their own followers in line. The honest ones among them have so invested their sense of self-identity into their worldview that any questioning of it feels like a direct attack on their core identity, which is reflexively interpreted as “hatred”.

Everyone seems to be in complete unison that lying and abusing your child is ABSOLUTELY wrong. …yet all managed to come to the EXACT same conclusion on right and wrong. Now that’s some powerful evidence!

And seeing as the unanimous decision is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE, AND IN DIRECT CONTRADICTION TO, what is commanded in the bible, if it is powerful evidence for anything, it is evidence that either there is no god, or if there is a god, that god is not the Judeo-Christian god.

The reason Jack Horner would not carbon date dinosaur soft-tissue is not because you can’t. […] It’s because he intuitively knew that there would 14C in it and that the evidence would go against his scientific beliefs.

THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THEY NEIGHBOR.

The visceral hatred and ugliness and crudeness and rudeness exhibited by just about everyone here

THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THEY NEIGHBOR.

All the evolutionists in the world had a knee-jerk reaction that Mary Schweitzer’s soft-tissue T-rex absolutely positively could not be soft-tissue.

THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THEY NEIGHBOR.

YYNJ, you are well-named. You really do need Jesus, very badly. Get off this thread and confess your sins!

Many people want to know how creationists reconcile 14C dates that are larger than 6,000 years. Great question. I think it’s possible to undo aspects of the theory of evolution using 14C and that is one issue. (They have found 14C in diamonds, that is not contamination.) Then a separate issue comes into play, of how a creationist reconciles that with his view. I think the answer is that Carbon dating is not an exact science. There are so many unknown variables from the past, that we can NEVER know which could and most likely did, affect the Carbon we have today. If 14C is so reliable, I would love to see living things carbon dated as a scientific test. (I may be getting in over my head here since I’m not a scientist, but here goes anyway!) When we know the exact age of something living, say an animal, plant or human, I would love to see the age that a carbon test produces for that living thing.

[Emphasis mine]

In other words, you consider carbon dating to be accurate when you can misuse it to “disprove” the theory of evolution, but you consider it inaccurate when others can use it to disprove young-Earth creationism.

And you don’t see anything wrong with that postion.

I’m shocked; shocked, I say.

But wait! If we truly “can NEVER know” what “unknown variables from the past” affected the “Carbon we have today,” how can you possibly believe that the C14 concentrations found – the ones that you claim “prove” the “soft tissue” found in the various dinosaur bones mentioned in this thread indicate that the dinosaurs in question are merely thousands of years old (as opposed to tens or hundreds of millions of years old) – are in any way accurate enough to support any claim whatsoever?

It seems suspiciously convenient that carbon dating is only accurate when it appears to disprove the theory of evolution.

It’s almost like you know you’re lying….

YesYouNeedJesus wrote:

There have been quite a lot of arguments and questions by everyone that have gone unanswered. I wish I could answer them, by [sic]I do not know much about science.

[Emphasis mine]

You claim that you don’t know much about science, and you’ve certainly provided ample evidence in support of this claim.

Yet you also believe that the little you know about science is enough to prove that the vast majority of people who have dedicated their lives to studying the science of evolution are completely, obviously, and even laughably wrong.

Taken at face value, this belief alone should give you pause.

There are, after all, certain inescapable implications if your belief is true.

One implication is that either you are a lot smarter than all of the scientists working in the field of evolution (since its flaws are so obvious to you, even with your limited knowledge of the subject), or all of the scientists in question are lying (since evolution is so obviously wrong in your view, we can safely preclude the possibility of mere “ignorance” on the part of the scientists).

In other words, your original belief (that the little you know about science is enough to prove that the theory of evolution is wrong) seems to require that you also believe either a) that you’re a genius of the highest caliber or b) that there’s a global conspiracy.

Yeah, I’m trying to think back to when I was as ignorant of science as Bob ‘n Willy, but my memory doesn’t go back that far.

I do remember when I sat down with all of the family religious-instruction books and did a bunch of reading and realized the reason I didn’t find any of the church services or Sunday school classes* the least bit interesting was that I didn’t believe any of it was true. That was when I was eight or possibly nine.

A few years later someone gave me a book on dinosaurs. Now THAT was some interesting stuff.

Another few years later an older sib brought home a Scholastic paperback with profiles of scientists. None of it earth-shattering stuff, and a lot of the actual work they were doing was kind of tedious, methodical, stuff. The one that I remember was a guy trying to figure out how vultures find dead things to eat.

Enyart is a proponent of corporal punishment of children saying that their “hearts are lifted” by spanking. He was convicted for misdemeanor child abuse in 1994 after beating his girlfriend’s child with a belt so hard that the beating broke the skin.

The hatred displayed here defies all logic if it really is David vs Goliath as you all claim. There’s something much deeper at work and I think I know what that is.

No surprise, you already said you were playing the persecution card back in post 320.

One can hypothesize that neutrons were once much more plentiful than they are now, and that is why there is so much carbon-14 in our experimental samples.

Carbon-14 is not the only activation product of neutron radiation. You would have to demonstrate a similar effect for other long-lived radionuclides, which, as we all know, you won’t.

One can hypothesize that neutrons were once much more plentiful than they are now, and that is why there is so much carbon-14 in our experimental samples.

Another prime example of the intellectual gymnastics that are required to contort reality to the creationist idiocy.

One can hypothesize that water was much denser in the time of the biblical character jesus which would have made his walking on water much easier.

But you’d also have to support that.

in fact one can hypothesize a lot of gibbering idiocy to support your anti-scientific nonsense, but again supporting it is something you all fail at consistently. And usually with hysterical side consequences.

Until proponents of evolution are brave enough to test it and answer this question then I will believe that you have something to hide.

If you’re so interested in the answer to that question, then you can prepare and submit the research proposal and obtain the funding to do that study.

But you do realize that the results, no matter what they say, will be irrelevant to both the age of the T-rex fossil, and to the reality of the evolution of T-rex, either way? Research funding is a scarce and valuable resource. In these times of economic difficulty, it is the epitome of irresponsible and wasteful spending to devote funds to an endeavor whose results will be irrelevant no matter what they turn out to be.

How much radiogenic lead and argon are in rocks that are found overlying such types of fossils?

Oh right, you don’t care, because you’re a cherry-picking moron who cares only about any evidence, or lie, that props up your lies.

Until proponents of evolution are brave enough to test it and answer this question then I will believe that you have something to hide.

Your stupidity and prejudice is not our command. Why would it be, cretin?

Here’s a thought, dickhead, you go out and pay for carbon-14 tests on dinosaur remains, such as bones found in coal which also include original carbon in some cases. It’s not for us to destroy valuable fossil material to just find out what we know already, that it’s tens of millions of years old.

Other fossil material containing original carbon is not as rare, and you could, you know, put your money where your mouth is, or STFU.

I repeat, a young T-rex fossil in light of the context of all evidence is prof of a young T-rex fossil. It would simply indicate that T-rex went extinct later than we suspected.

If we found Smith at the theater his wife worked at, in her dressing room, her dead body on the ground and a knife in his hand and the coroner estimated the murder to be at 8:00, but a traffic light camera showed Smith arriving at the scene at 7:30…that does not exonerate Smith

the very articles you clowns cited SHOWED THIS. I even quote the exact section from the results and discussion sections of the paper to show you this. AGAIN, the c14 tests WERE NOT TO AGE THE SAMPLES. They were used as a control to help eliminate the null hypothesis that the organic residues were from a relatively recent contamination event. Which, as I noted at the time, THEY DIDN’T.

that BOB ENYART, IGNORANT LYING CHILD ABUSER, and WILL DUFFY, IGNORANT LYING TERRORIST, also have obvious reading comprehension problems does not change this.

Why don’t any of these braying asses ever tell us why non-avian dinosaur bones are found (in their original state, that is) below the “iridium layer” from the Chicxulub impact, which, amazingly enough, is dated to 63 million years ago (or so)?

Or even if they had a reasonable explanation for the geologic column that doesn’t require deep time. It’s not like we didn’t know that dinosaur bones had to be from many millions of years ago prior to radiometric dating and cyclostratigraphy (astronomical dating). I’d especially be interested in how apparent result from millions of years of changes in earth’s orbit and precession happen to end up in strata a few thousand years old.

Oh, that’s right, these are people dedicated to delusion and opposition to the truth as it is inferred from the evidence, so don’t care the slightest about any evidence that supports evolution and deep time. If they’re ever charged with a crime it’ll be time for them to experience what such prejudice actually does to the truth, and they can be convicted by “The Holy Truth” as written by myself, which will point out the truth that these people are all rapists, murderers, and child molesters.

The evidence be damned when it’s their time in court. Because clearly they’d be hypocrites to demand that legitimate evidence be presented in its entirety, when they’re in favor of anything but that when science subjects are being discussed.

I have not been a participant on this thread since it came out while I was without computer last week and quickly got too big to read. Nevertheless, I had to check on these child abuse accusations. It would appear that Enyart believes that physically abusing a child is “loving discipline”, but that’s apparently okay, because:

I’m am so grateful to God that our boys respect and love us through these many years. It is sad, however, that PZ thinks that his loved ones will die and be expunged from existence. They will not, they will live forever. And he and they will get their desire, either to live forever and enjoy each other with God, or to live forever without Him.

Well that just makes it all peachy. Not at all like a death cult. My question is: Why would you want to live forever?

1. I think that this thread is evidence for God. Everyone seems to be in complete unison that lying and abusing your child is ABSOLUTELY wrong. You all probably deny moral absolutes, but your words and actions show otherwise. And to think that you all were raised in different homes, by different sets of parents, and in different communities and societies, yet all managed to come to the EXACT same conclusion on right and wrong. Now that’s some powerful evidence!

How is that evidence for God? Neglect for a moment that consensus doesn’t imply absolutes (would if everyone here agreed that pineapple shouldn’t go on pizza, that would make it an absolute?), but how does it follow that the consensus means any god, let alone your God?

Just answer this, is the only thing stopping you stealing from your friends, raping, torturing and killing your loved ones, that you God has condemned them? In other words, if you lost your belief in God or you believed God commanded you to do those things, would you do them? If not, then what does God do for morality?

And that’s just the problem. You claimed to read every comment, but what about my #315 where I specifically addressed this issue? Morality has to do with how we treat each other, and how we ought to treat each other. That all of us find child abuse wrong doesn’t mean that child abuse is wrong, but let’s say it does. Why would that need to go any further, other than to say “it’s just wrong”? Why does an absolute need something more? Of course, there are plenty of meta-ethical frameworks by which the question of right or wrong could be framed (it’s wrong because it harms an individual, or it’s wrong because it violates another’s autonomy, etc.) but at no point do we need to invoke God to maintain such a statement.

Morality is an evolved trait, it’s part of our neurobiology. The existence of moral thinking, or consensus moral thinking is only indicative that we have a moral sense – not that the sense is reflective of some universal absolute. The overwhelming majority of people across the world think in the same utilitarian way given the same scenario (the trolley problem) irrespective of culture. But all that indicates is that we have similar brain processes, and not of anything outside of ourselves – except perhaps that certain strategies of thinking are more successful in an evolutionary sense than others.

So the question would then be does God remove all memory of the loved ones that aren’t saved like some sort of Celestial Stalinist Airbrush or would I have to endure eternity with the guilt of buying into a system that did the worst thing imaginable to a loved one?

So the question would then be does God remove all memory of the loved ones that aren’t saved like some sort of Celestial Stalinist Airbrush or would I have to endure eternity with the guilt of buying into a system that did the worst thing imaginable to a loved one?

Getting rid of evidence is what he does best. He got rid of all of the evidence of Noah’s Flood, the young earth, and the design of life, replacing it all with evidence for deep time and evolution.

In the original paper (on the mosasaur, IIRC), just barely above what is detectable over background levels, or about equivalent to what would be seen after 9 half-lives of decay if there hadn’t been any contamination.

The same fossils of course were all found BELOW the KT irridium layer, which dates to 65 million years via numerous techniques not involving C14 (all agreeing on the 65 million year date).

So either all those other dating techniques are correct, and the C14 result not relevant to the age of the fossil via mechanisms that are all well understood, or the C14 result is an accurate age (5 TIMES older than the YEC age of the universe, of course), and all the other dating techniques are all unreliable, each in its own unique, as yet unknown way, such that all of them happen to randomly give the same result.

The carbon 14 dating on something old by other means of dating is a red herring (false clue to you non-mystery buffs). Science has shown carbon 14 can form from both nitrogen 14 and carbon 13 by neutron capture, and the Earth itself contains radioactive elements which give off said neutrons, plus the sun and cosmic rays produce their share too. Any million/billion year old dated material containing carbon may or may not show carbon 14, and if it does, it was formed while it was deposited in the Earth by neutron capture. Period, end of story, as any real scientist knows, but idiotic creobots must pretend (they have nothing other than pretense) it is a “gottcha” moment for them…NOT. They need to prove otherwise by citing the peer reviewed scientific literature, not a web sites known for the lies and bullshitting that is called creationism.

Mr. Enyart, would you please read this entire thread and the entire ScienceBlogs thread before adding to either one? Several of your claims have been answered, some of them even several times independently, yet you keep acting as if that had never happened. The issue of C-14 in diamonds and coal is such a case.

Haldane: “There are, of course, difficulties in the theory of evolution. … I agree with you that some processes, such as the evolution of the mammalian ear bones, probably occurred by sudden leaps.

Ha! That’s something where Haldane has turned out to be very, very wrong. I happen to have this summary handy. If you want citations, I can supply those.

Hana had been adopted from Ethiopia deleted for length.

raven, have you noticed that a brilliant invention has been made lately? I’m talking about the brackets.

You keep inserting your own remarks into stuff you quote. That’s annoying at best, dishonest at worst.

the battle over the existence of God was lost long, long ago, and most recognized this long before the 20th century, though I think it took Nietzsche to really put it poetically.

Well, yeah, it’s good poetry (with such things as “How were we capable of drinking up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon?”), but Nietzsche, or anyway his Zarathus[h]tra, then goes on to say that this is meant more literally that one might think: that God has existed, has lived, and is now dead. That I disagree with: I agree with Grayling that there’s no reason to assume gods, goddesses, fairies, goblins, or sprites in the past, present, or future.

The visceral hatred and ugliness and crudeness and rudeness exhibited by just about everyone here is evidence to me that you truly do not believe inside that you hold the truth and that you truly do not believe inside you are arguing with creationists that have the intelligence of an 8th grader.

1) There are people who go to very great lengths to avoid “ugliness and crudeness and rudeness” for extra-special occasions of “visceral hatred”; when they say shit, you know there’s been a catastrophe, and when they say fuck, you know hell has broken loose. We here are not among those people who seem to believe that words have magic power. We’re scientists. We’ve trained long and hard to call a spade a spade; you can’t be surprised when we call a demented fuckwit a demented fuckwit.

2) Ignoring 1), suppose for the sake of the argument that we’re all frothing at the mouth and would tear you to tiny shreds if we got you between our hands. So what? Does that make our arguments wrong? Oh, sure, it would make us evil, but I can’t see how it would make our arguments wrong. William Shockley was an asshole (really, there’s no other way to describe it), and yet he invented the transistor; he was right about how semiconductor electronics works, and almost every single electronic device in the world confirms it; he’s the man who put the silicon in Silicon Valley.

3) It’s not so much your intelligence that is that of an 8th-grader. It’s your knowledge, your general education, that is that of a… 1st-grader. When that is coupled with the Dunning/Kruger effect, which is strong in you two, we get annoyed.

Think of all the subjects one could just destroy an 8th grader on. But does that really feel good? No, because it’s someone that doesn’t know much. When arguing with an 8th grader on economics, as an example, would you EVER be tempted to spew all the ugliness on him that has been spewed here?

The 8th-grader probably knows he’s an 8th-grader; he probably knows that his knowledge of economics (or whatever) is not exhaustive. You, on the other hand, suffer from the Dunning/Kruger effect. You believe that the knowledge you have – at least about biology, if not about economics – is all the knowledge there is. You believe that if you can’t imagine how something could have worked, it can’t have happened. Few 8th-graders suffer from that problem.

They have found 14C in diamonds, that is not contamination.

Read the ScienceBlogs thread.

If 14C is so reliable, I would love to see living things carbon dated as a scientific test. (I may be getting in over my head here since I’m not a scientist, but here goes anyway!)

That has been done. You have no idea how many orders of magnitude you’re in over your head. You know almost nothing about 14C dating.

He assumes that dinosaurs are a million years old

Sixty-five million years old for the youngest ones that aren’t birds.

One million years ago was almost yesterday; at that time, the world was almost as it is now. Dunning/Kruger.

I know everyone will say that it is a proven fact, but how many times have evolutionary scientists said something was a proven fact and were wrong? Spontaneous generation anyone? Everyone here willingly admits that science changes and progresses through science.

Creationist logic: Science has been wrong before, therefore all science is so totally unreliable it can be completely ignored! Whoopeeeeee!

The burden of evidence is on you. You challenge the dating of the Hell Creek Formation, you provide the data that show it’s younger than people think.

All the [other] evolutionists in the world had a knee-jerk reaction that Mary Schweitzer’s soft-tissue T-rex absolutely positively could not be soft-tissue.

Classical Dunning/Kruger: you don’t have the faintest idea of what most biologists think.

Sure, some had that reaction. Others, myself included, had the reaction “oh, wow, so proteins – already known to be rather robust chemically, much more so than DNA – can survive for long times under special conditions. What conditions? They say they only found the stuff inside robust, unbroken bones; that makes sense…”

Mary Schweitzer went under attack by evolutionists nationwide

*facepalm*

“Nationwide”.

You have no idea how painfully ridiculous you’re making yourself.

Dude! Science is global! Internet! Publications come out all over the world on the same day! There is no such thing as a nation in science!!!

(…Except North Korea.)

Mary Schweitzer asked a scientist what evidence he would need to see to believe that this was original biological material and he said something like, “No evidence would ever convince me.”

Ooh. Argument from anonymous anecdote.

Assuming this dolt really exists, and really is a dolt (creationists are well known for quote-mining), what in the fuck makes you think he’s representative for anything? You act as if Schweitzer had asked most scientists in the world!

Painfully embarrassing.

When you have to resort to posts declaring how angry we are, it indicates you have no other real argument.

Exactly.

Handbook of Chemistry and Physics

(It’s called “handbook” because you can just barely lift it with one hand.)

You can no more date living things using radiocarbon than you can tell time with an hourglass that continually has sand being added to the top half of the glass.

Not all parts of all living things are like that. Some are renewed much more slowly or not at all, and those can be dated – and on a few occasions have been.

I read a study that suggested that all nuclear bomb testing has actually contributed up to 3% of the total amount of c14 hanging about.

3% might not sound like a lot to an IGNORANT LIAR AND CHILD ABUSER, like BOB ENYART, but I find that pretty amazing, really.

Yep. The bomb spike, as it’s called, is huge. Way off the charts. If dates after the first nuclear-bomb test would be derived from just extrapolating the curve, they’d lie tens of thousands of years in the future.

the “iridium layer” from the Chicxulub impact, which, amazingly enough, is dated to 63 million years ago (or so)?

I think it’s possible to undo aspects of the theory of evolution using 14C and that is one issue. (They have found 14C in diamonds, that is not contamination.) Then a separate issue comes into play, of how a creationist reconciles that with his view. I think the answer is that Carbon dating is not an exact science.

The interesting thing about this is such an argument is not new. Back in the early days of evolutionary theory, there was a big disagreement between biology and physics. While physicists knew that the earth was old, there was an upper limit calculated by the age of the sun. Given what was known at the time about chemical energy, the sun would have run out of resources in, at most, 20 million years; so there wasn’t enough time for evolution to take place. Yet back then the evidence was sufficient to stick by evolution.

150 years later, physics has caught up – what Lord Kelvin missed was nuclear energy, that allowed the sun to be orders of magnitude older. And in that time, biology has been much more deeply studied – much more has been collected, and even new disciplines that Darwin or Wallace couldn’t even dream of.

So realistically, what could one anomaly do to the theory of evolution? Heck, when it was at odd with cutting-edge physics, it was evolution that won out. Really, what can you expect C14 to invalidate about evolution? I’m betting not much, but C14 serves as a defeater argument rather than as any attempt to advance science – so we shouldn’t expect it to. But that’s what happens when science goes against your presuppositions; if we really need Jesus, then what does it matter about what proper science really says?

Oh yeah, and the correct thing to do when ‘stealing something off the internet’ is to provide a citation of where you stole it from.

He either stole it from Creation Ministries International site or one of several sites that copypasta’d it from there. The original comes from Dr. Paul Giem in this article for the Geoscience Research Institute, which is, according to them, an “official institute of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.” And according to Giem’s biography on AiG, he “holds a B.A. in chemistry from Union College, Nebraska, an M.A. in religion from Loma Linda University and an M.D. from Loma Linda University.” And he “has published research articles in the areas of religion and medicine. His current research includes work on carbon-14 dating methods.” None of which appear to be published in genuine research journals, but I didn’t do an exhaustive search.

(Note to Duffy: I found all that by following the footnotes on the first site that came up with the quote you gave and doing a second search on Giem’s name. Wasn’t hard.)

1. I think that this thread is evidence for God. Everyone seems to be in complete unison that lying and abusing your child is ABSOLUTELY wrong. You all probably deny moral absolutes, but your words and actions show otherwise. And to think that you all were raised in different homes, by different sets of parents, and in different communities and societies, yet all managed to come to the EXACT same conclusion on right and wrong. Now that’s some powerful evidence!

It’s interesting to just reflect on the implications of this statement. If YesYouNeedJesus is correct, then morality as it is practised is either incoherent or unjustified except in his particular religion. Isn’t it amazing how one can take such a fundamental aspect to the human condition and place it as the sole domain of their own belief system?

Better yet, isn’t it fortunate that YesYouNeedJesus was born into somewhere that had the right belief system? Imagine how lacking his life would be if he were born into an aboriginal tribe 250 years ago that had right and wrong, but didn’t realise that the right and wrong meant the Christian deity. If he was born into a Buddhist part of Thailand, wisdom of right and wrong would have been passed down, but the Christian deity would be nowhere to be found with it. Heck, it’s lucky he wasn’t born in Iran into a Muslim society, because again the sense of right and wrong would not have its sufficient grounding without the Christian deity. And it’s especially lucky that he didn’t grow up without religion at all, because he may have used reason, experience, empathy, sympathy, and understanding as his basis for right and wrong – all for nothing because it doesn’t have the Christian deity mandating it.

How is this not brainwashing? As Stephen Law wrote in Believing Bullshit: “By constantly harping on the vagaries, uncertainties, and the meaninglessness of life outside your belief system, the simple, concrete certainties you offer may begin to seem increasingly attractive to your audience.” His point being that if you don’t give people any alternatives, they’ll see the belief on offer as the only way to have something dear to them. So when you write off all us non-believers (or non-Christians as the logic would imply – lest you argue that all that matters is the belief itself, in which case you’ve lost all grounds for the argument), how is it anything other than conforming to a brainwashing tool in order to continue to persist in your belief? How can you not feel manipulated and doubt your beliefs when it involves casting aside the rest of humanity as lacking something so fundamental?

Because think of the implications if your view is correct. That the only way one can have an ought statement is if God specially created us. That is, “I’m not going to rescue that drowning child because the child needs help and I have the capacity to save him” but “I’m going to rescue that child because God commanded me to”. Do you honestly think that there’s no ought without God? If so, then you are casting away what morality is. And worse, you are casting aside part of the humanity of others in order to maintain that belief. That’s cult thinking, and any person who even reflects for two seconds on the problem should see how absurd it is. But I’m sure it makes sense to you, and you’ll think up an excuse as to what my account is missing – the human brain is good like that, it has amazing powers of rationalisation.

If you would steal from your friends, or rape and murder your family if it was the case that “without God everything is permitted”, then I hope you never lose your faith. Because if it’s more important to say “God exists” than to even admit the possibility of normative morality without God, then if you really mean it your friends, family and the community at large should have everything to fear if you lose it.

I should add that when I say “brainwashing”, I don’t mean in the Hollywood version of it. Rather that a belief has been attached to that which is of psychological importance, to the point that one cannot have that desired feature without the belief. Attaching a belief to masturbation, for example, has this desired effect because all people masturbate – so condemning masturbation as wrong is going to reinforce the belief because of the psychological association. And really, that’s all that brainwashing needs. How is it you think that people outside of your religious belief think about morality? Do you honestly think anything goes for everyone except for those in your religion? Or that one cannot possibly think of justifications except that lead to your religion? If so, how else to describe that than brainwashing?

Because even if you think that your religion is the grounding for morality, you still should be able to appreciate where others are coming from. That you can’t is quite telling – unless you are perfectly capable of doing so but choose not to for a victory of rhetoric, but that would be even more telling…

Nice job people – and honestly the few pejoratives used paled in comparison to the thoughtful and well presented educational material.

It strikes me that only a deficient (lacking capability) and/or faulty (psychological problem) mind could not be swayed by force of the schooling herein.

But I really think the overriding root cause factor for the idiocy presented by the Bobs of the world is that they are charlatans plain and simple to begin and end with. And just like with any mental exercise, you do it long enough it becomes a reality to you even if to start out you sort of know you are BSing. In other words you start sort of believing your own lies! A mental phenomena useful to con-men and other sociopaths.

I can see some people STILL claiming a faith in a god – even after accepting all of the arguments of a scientific and logical nature herein. The people who just feel there is a higher power and it gives them personal comfort and strength, and/or the people that have strong social ties to their religion and that gives them help and strength.

I may think it childish of them – totally unnecessary construct – but I admit I have no right to get in their face about it. It is benign childishness. Life is tough – we all need silly things every once and a while to help us through it.

Honest and moral people may be “silly” but they do not impose their child-like thinking on the world – it is a personal thing and in addition it does NOT interfere with their otherwise accepting and even promoting scientific honest reality.

The people we address herein are NOT these people I can understand and respect at some significant level otherwise.

Zarathus[h]tra, then goes on to say that this is meant more literally that one might think: that God has existed, has lived, and is now dead.

Well, as a fictional character he would have to speak in literal terms. A fictional character cannot skirt the issue but must make strong pronouncements. A fictional character can (has to) get away with a lot more than a real person.

As an allegorical figure Zarathustra inhabits an allegorical world and makes statements that are categorical (and “real”) in that world. We are on the outside looking in, so his statements remain allegorical in ours.

It is sad when goddists conflate the world of allegory with the real world. Perhaps they have forgotten why people created these stories in the first place. Hesiod and Homer and a host of poets created all manner of tales of the Olympian Gods. They inspire and warn and cajole us mere mortals to a higher level of living and thinking. Divine inspiration.

At some stage these stories could not propel the Greeks any higher. In time the magical Golden Age of Hellenism came apart- as the bridge of religion could not span the gap between Ideal and Reality. Although the Cynics condemned the effort, we can step back and agree that there was actually real value in the effort. But in the end it failed and the gods died. As all gods eventually must, jeebus and sky-daddy included.

It’s a Christian’s joke told by the adults amongst themselves. What they don’t realize is that Christian’s make fools of themselves every day, atheists make fools of Christians every day, and the Bible is the greatest practical joke in history, bar none.
The French, being secular, have a similar day every week called “le lundi” or “the loon day” in which they chuckle at the the Christians tradition of spending a whole day in reverence, as instructed in this bible of theirs, and say, “Okay, vous avez montré combien vous êtes bête, maintenant obtenir la baise au travail!” Translation here.